Youth Services

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Ben Bradley]

The Minister is nodding, which is brilliant news. I know that the NYA will be relieved to hear that.

There needs to be a consistent understanding of the level of service, and suitable data should be available to answer the question of whether there is sufficient youth work in any particular area. For example, we do not know the sector’s balance between private, public and voluntary sectors. It is important to explore the changes that have happened over the last decade and examine exactly what we have in place now before we decide whether that is good enough. The reinstatement of the NYA audit, which determined levels of local authority provision, would help us to start to understand the picture at a national level. The last of these reported back in 2008, and things have clearly changed in our provision and youth work since then.

We have witnessed a reduction from 75% to just 25% of the youth workforce holding qualifications in youth work, and we have seen a nearly two-thirds drop in the number of new youth work graduate and postgraduate students since the peak. We are now in a position where there are not enough professionals in the sector, and we need to tackle this issue. With preventive services, as with anything we are trying to reinvigorate—for instance, the recruitment of teachers or doctors—the time involved in training people and putting in place qualifications to get people into the sector can be too long. We need to be looking now at how we support those qualifications, to ensure that if the Government do go ahead with plans for something, such as having youth workers more closely related to schools and tying those things together, we have youth workers trained and ready to deliver that. Pushing for those qualifications, and for the funding needed for their renewal, is absolutely vital.

I do not want to bang on for much longer—

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is not banging on at all; he is making an important speech, and I congratulate him on the report. On the question of qualifications and the recruitment of youth workers, I completely agree that we need well qualified youth workers, because we have lost many of them. Would he support a scheme along the lines of Teach First, Step Up to Social Work or Frontline, for example, whereby good graduates would be given fast-track training in youth work and then deployed in more challenging areas where they could do some really good work, whether on gang violence, the troubled families programme or similar issues? We need to recruit really good people and then make sure that they have the right skills to do what is quite a challenging job.

[Ben Bradley]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I recognise his commitment to children and young people, particularly as a former Minister—I know that any time I take part in such a debate, he is there contributing to it, which is very welcome. I totally agree with him. Securing and renewing qualifications is vital. Any way that we can find interested, aspirational and talented young people who are capable of engaging in this sector, whether they are talented graduates or people volunteering in youth work right now, who we can perhaps fast-track through the system to ensure that we have the right skills and qualifications in place, is very welcome.

I want to highlight UK Active’s proposals for opening school facilities during the summer holidays to ensure that there is provision for young people. We see spikes in so many social issues over the summer, when children are not engaged in statutory education. A huge proportion of our sports facilities, for example, are locked away behind school gates in the evenings, at weekends and during the summer holidays, which is unbelievable when we consider some of the incredible facilities available. I know that the Minister has engaged in that proposal before. I urge the Government to continue to work with UK Active to open up youth provision in the summer holidays.

I want to mention a local social enterprise called Life Skills Education, which runs a programme called DARE. There are no local colleagues in the Chamber right now, but at some stage in the past 25 years they will probably all have gone through a DARE programme. When I did it at school, it was about drug and alcohol education. My dad used to come into school on his police motorbike and we all used to go into the playground to talk about the police and what they did—it was all very exciting. That early intervention and education in schools has been revived in recent years in Nottinghamshire. Life Skills Education, which is based in my constituency, has just had a load of funding from the police and crime commissioner so that it can expand into every school in Nottinghamshire, getting in there with early intervention to deal with things such as knife crime, hate crime and the massively expanded curriculum now offered in Nottinghamshire’s schools. I just wanted to highlight that programme and encourage the Minister, if she gets the opportunity, to support it.

With the youth work census, which looks in detail at what services exist and how they are structured, identifies gaps and creates statutory guidance and a clearer definition of what a sufficient level of youth work actually looks like, we can ensure that youth workers and youth services can meet the needs of young people across the country.

I thank the Minister for her personal interest in and support for youth work in the APPG’s inquiry. I welcome the investment she spoke about for supporting those qualifications and interventions, and the youth charter. I urge the Government currently taking shape around us this afternoon to ensure that they do all they can to support youth work, by implementing the youth work census and ensuring that we fund local services properly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown). She reminds us that in a digital world, where more and more young people spend time with their iPads or iPods and so on—as we all increasingly do—the need for them to have exposure to situations that those of us who were brought up in an analogue world took more for granted is extraordinarily important.

I want to make some remarks about the situation for youth services today, and I thank the Minister for her enthusiasm at the Dispatch Box. As shadow skills Minister, it was particularly interesting for me to hear her talk about the establishment of a new level 3 apprenticeship in this regard. I obviously welcome that, but we need to take into account the fact that many of the people who have previously qualified as youth workers have, for the reasons that we have discussed today, simply been unable to find jobs in that area. Another genuine point I make to her is that this needs to be taken forward very carefully because what happens at levels 1 and 2—I do not know whether the intention is to do anything preparatory in this area—is critical in getting the right sort of people to do this sort of thing.

I praise the very comprehensive speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith), the shadow Minister for youth affairs. She put her finger on so many of the disappointments and failings of recent years. She gave statistics on the amount by which spending had gone down and everything else, and all this is in the context of councils having had some of the worst cuts in recent years. I think particularly of my council in Blackpool, where we have lost about £700 million of funding. I say to the Minister and her departmental colleagues—her Department also focuses significantly on seaside and coastal towns, because of tourism issues—that small unitary authorities, such as mine in Blackpool, have suffered the most from that. The heavy toll of those cuts on children’s services, on social care and children’s care and on the number of young people who come to towns such as Blackpool sometimes looking for the proverbial streets that are paved with gold, but finding that that is not the case, is an additional burden and challenge for my local authority. That is why I welcome what my hon. Friend said, not just today but on other occasions, about expansion.

The main purpose of youth services under a Labour Government will be to provide non-formal education through personal, social and political development. It will be absolutely clear that young people will be at the centre of determining a new statutory youth service, because the issue is the same as it is in education. Too often, young people feel and find that education is done to them, or sometimes for them, and not with them. That needs to be taken on board, whether we are talking about the National Citizen Service or any of the other initiatives that the Government have introduced.

It is also important that local councils partner locally with organisations to develop a diverse universal offer to establish and submit long-term plans for local delivery, but they can do that only if there is significant security from long-term funding. That has not been the case with Governments since 2010. There is a whole list of things, including rebuilding the workforce, long-term proportionate evaluation and so on, that we need to take forward. I hope not least that the impetus provided by the most excellent report from the all-party group on youth affairs, chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle), will have made waves for this Government, and will do the same for the new Government. As many have said, we wait to see the colour of their money in this area.

There has been some discussion about the value of the NCS this afternoon. Clearly, it has done some useful work for lots of people. I would cite one of my former Blackpool apprentices who took part in two or three NCS initiatives that inspired in her an interest in public affairs and a confidence that allowed her to go to work in a pressurised office environment and has now taken her on to a university degree. There are such individual examples, but, given how much money the NCS has been getting, compared with the number of young people it has delivered for, it is not the ideal solution. This needs to be taken onboard.

The hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy), who is no longer in his place, and others have referred to the work that voluntary youth organisations have had to take on because of the lack of funding. I think of uniformed groups such as the Scouts, Girl Guides, Cadets, the Woodcraft Folk, and so on. I pay tribute to the Scouts Association. I pay tribute to Ann Limb, the first woman chair of the association, who is a long-standing friend of mine, and to Matt Hyde, the chief executive, for the way they have reinvigorated and energised the association for the 21st century. I particularly praise their skills for life programme. We have talked about informal learning and inspiration. Those skills for life are precisely the sorts of enabling skills that young people need not just in school but out of school.

[Tim Loughton]

As one of those who helped to design the National Citizen Service, I am obviously rather protective of it. I pay tribute to Matt Hyde, as has the hon. Gentleman. The Scouts have been very supportive of the NCS, and obviously the NCS has had a lot of investment, but will he take it from me that that should not be seen as displacing investment from youth services? It is not just the cost of the project; the NCS is a recruiting tool for youth leaders of the future, including for the Scouts. The data also shows that those who have been through the NCS achieve better results at school. The payback from the investment comes over several years; it is not just about the cost of running that initially three-week summer experience.

[Gordon Marsden]

I entirely accept that, and I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman, who was an extraordinarily good Children’s Minister. He is absolutely right to make the point about the wave effects, if I can put it that way. I am not saying that the NCS has not done good work; I am saying that it is not to be regarded as a substitute for the sort of statutory process we will need in the future.

I am very proud to be a Scout ambassador in Blackpool. I pay tribute to the Scout district commissioner, Victoria DaSilva, and to the president, an extremely formidable lady and councillor from the Minister’s own party, Councillor Lily Henderson. They, and everyone in Blackpool, have expanded the Scouts in recent years. It is not all doom and gloom, therefore, but we know about the number of youth and community workers who have lost their jobs since 2008.

The situation in the careers services runs in parallel to the way in which Government have generally treated the youth service. The argument is the same. No one disputes that individual initiatives, properly carried out, can make a great difference, but they are no substitute for a long-term process, which is what we need. My hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood on the Front Bench talked about the fall in the number of degrees, including graduate certificates and postgraduate diplomas, in youth work programmes. That is inevitable when people cannot find decent jobs and are not given a structure.

I entirely agree with the hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) that not every space has to be a five-star building and that it is what goes on inside that matters. Nevertheless, it is a tragedy that many of the last Labour Government’s investments in decent buildings have not flourished because of post-2010 austerity. Many of those buildings could not be used for their original purpose. Before I came to this debate, I checked the dates. One of the last of those buildings was erected in Blackpool. The Oracle youth hub is a fantastic, new, modernistic building not far from my offices. Building started in November 2010. I have looked up in my local newspaper the date it was opened. It is a fantastic, dynamic building. We were told by the Blackpool Gazette in 2012 that the building was going to do wonderful things, but of course it has not because it has not had the money or the staff. That is a great shame, and similar situations should be avoided in future.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood paid tribute to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport for taking on the project. As a former Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Department, however, I gently say to the Minister—to whom I mean no disrespect—that I know that DCMS has to cover a huge range of issues. I do not think things have changed that much since my day—they are probably worse, if anything—so I am sure the Minister will agree that DCMS civil servants are called on to undertake a considerable amount of work compared with those in other Departments. While DCMS takes this forward, it is important that every other Government Department, including the Department of Health and Social Care and the Ministry of Justice, does not see it as an opportunity to say, “Oh well, DCMS is doing that.” I am sure the Minister does not need any lessons from me or, indeed, the new Secretary of State, if there is going to be a new Secretary of State, on lobbying in that regard. I gently say, however, that it is very important that DCMS should not be seen as being solely responsible for this particular area.

I want to turn briefly to the report’s recommendations. They have been covered extensively, and I have no doubt that my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown will want to talk about them in due course. I want to pluck out two quotations from the report. The first is from the British Youth Council, whose executive I was a member of many years ago. It says:

“We believe properly funded youth services and agencies aid young people in their personal development and their ability to function in society.”

That is a huge issue in terms of citizenship.

The second quotation is from the hon. Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan), who is the vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on youth affairs. In comments that echo those made by others, including my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood, she said:

“we lack a coherent approach to secure and sustain youth work, and a proper understanding of the levels and extent of youth work needed to achieve the best outcomes for young people.”

I want to close with two or three examples of what has been done on the ground in Blackpool in recent years. Last year I met a group of HeadStart apprentices; that is a Big Lottery-funded agency programme providing resilience for young people across Blackpool, particularly in mental health areas, and it does a fantastic job. It gives the apprentices themselves a varied and creative programme to qualify in, while helping empower hundreds of young people in Blackpool schools and also on a one-to-one basis and in conjunction with local charities such as mine. It has been doing things just in the last month. Blackpool’s Talbot road has been made into the country’s first resilience pathway. That pathway illustrates 42 different moves in life that might help young people and their families and friends to find a sense of belonging, and it was put together by young people in Blackpool themselves. Each paving stone is designed to represent an idea or suggestion that helps young people and their families and friends find a sense of belonging, and I am glad to say that that has received some funding from the Lancashire enterprise partnership.

I also want to touch on the fantastic work done by young carers in Blackpool; they need to be highlighted because they too are acquiring skills at a time when they are having also to attend school. I also want to highlight the Blackpool Youth Council and the body that organises the annual elections for it, URPotential, and to praise particularly Debbie Terras, the previous chief executive, who did a fantastic job and brought people from Blackpool on two occasions to this place to participate in activities here.

I mentioned at the beginning of my speech the number of young people who come to Blackpool and find themselves in disarray not just with housing but with other issues as well, and I also want to mention our local charity the Streetlife Trust, whose chief executive Jane Hugo is now one of my councillors in a ward in the centre of town.

Finally, I want to talk about the work of the Blackpool Boys and Girls Club and its youth worker, Dave Blacker, who has worked for 43 years with the club. Its most recent initiative is an exhibition. We have had some problems with vandalism in our key park, Stanley Park, and those young people have put together an exhibition of their thoughts and images about that. Elaine Smith, doyenne and chair of Stanley Park, said it is all too easy to look at young people in the park and wonder if they are up to no good and that the exhibition

“shows that so many of our children really do care.”

We have a lot to be thankful for from initiatives in Blackpool started by individuals, and I am reminded of the old song “Sisters are doin’ it for themselves”; young people are doing it for themselves, but they should not have to do it all on their own, and there should be a proper statutory youth service to go with this.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the Minister for this debate. I rise as the chair of the all-party group on youth affairs who produced this report with my vice-chair the hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) and my former vice-chair the hon. Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan). Our travels up and down the country visiting youth centres in many constituencies played an important role and helped to provide the basis of this report.

I rise also as someone who worked in my local youth service when I left school at 16. I worked at the National Youth Agency, which of course helped to produce the report, and then spent four years in Brussels at the European Youth Forum. I was also a voluntary group leader in my local Woodcraft Folk, then national chair in the Youth Parliament, and I, too, served on the board of the British Youth Council. I could therefore say that I am steeped in this subject and it flows through my veins, but that does not mean that that I just biasedly think it is fantastic. That is why we tried to base the report on the evidence that we received—over 100 pieces of evidence came in—and the visits we undertook.

When I joined Parliament and became chair of the APPG, I was deeply concerned that the opportunities that I had, the safety nets that we heard about from other hon. Members and the spaces that supported us growing up had started to wither away. It is now nine years since Parliament looked at these issues, and in that time the youth portfolio has been in three different Government Departments. With the National Youth Agency, we agreed to initiate the report, and we applied for a Backbench Business debate on the subject. I am rather pleased that the Minister has stolen the Backbench Business debate that the hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) and I applied for and that was due to take place tomorrow, because I think it shows that she will treat this issue with some importance and that Government time has been scheduled for it. I hope this is a sign that the Minister will keep her role. I will not give her my total backing, because that would probably undermine her if she wanted a job in the future, but I will say that she has shown a real regard for youth services that we perhaps have not seen previously. I intend no offence to previous Ministers, because the portfolio is huge, but her showing an understanding of youth has been really welcome. I also welcome today’s announcement that 3,000 young people will be given opportunities in sports, that there will be £500,000 in student bursaries for 400 students on the apprenticeship programme, that the youth charter will be produced and, most important, that we will have a review of statutory youth provision and what that means.

I will quickly rattle through some of the key findings of the APPG report, then offer some personal reflections on where the sector is now. Our first recommendation was that there should be a Minister responsible for the portfolio focused on young people. As I have said, to be effective, the Minister needs to give greater priority to youth work and youth services, and I think that she has done that. However, she is currently the Minister for Sport and Civil Society and has responsibility not only for youth but for gambling, horse-racing, lotteries and loneliness. Yes, these things are interconnected, but the reality is that a Minister with responsibility for children and young people who can focus on that area and the interconnectedness across Government is desperately needed. It is not only our APPG that has made this point; others dealing with different parts of the journey of a child have also done so.

[Tim Loughton]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his report. He and I attended the same school, with just a few years in between us. What he has just suggested as his No. 1 recommendation was actually the case some seven years ago, when the youth brief was within the Department for Education as part of the children and families brief. As a result, we produced the “Positive for Youth” report in 2011, which was the most comprehensive policy document of proposals on an integrated youth policy involving the statutory sector, the charity sector and the business sector. So we are only trying to reinvent the wheel here.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

A lot of this report is about either reinventing the wheel or looking back into the past and seeing what we can learn from the positive things. Always, while going forward we must know our history. I would say that the hon. Gentleman was one of the best children and youth Ministers that we have had in a Conservative Government in recent history. He should be very pleased with the work that he did when he was a Minister, and his departure was a great shame. That is the past, but we can learn from some of the good things that happened.

Our report also says that there needs to be greater investment in youth work and a commitment to support for youth services in the next comprehensive spending review. There is no purpose in talking about nice, positive little programmes here and little grants there that do not scratch the surface unless, as we have heard already, there is a decent strategic commitment to funding as part of a long-term Government funding review. We call for further research to determine what the benefit-cost ratio would need to be to ensure that open access youth services and appropriate long-term funding are provided.

Our next point is that the Government should introduce a clear statutory duty and guidance to define the minimum protected level of service. Councils do have a statutory duty to provide some youth activities, but the guidance on what “some youth activities” means is so weak that a horse and cart can be driven through it. It can effectively mean that we could have a local youth football club playing once a week in the local park and that is it. I welcome the Government’s commitment to review the guidance, but we really need not just a review, but clear directions that outcomes must be significantly better than we have at the moment.

Youth provision is disappearing across the country due to cuts, but the truth is that we do not even know the state of services after all those cuts, because we have not had an audit of local authority provision since the coalition Government. We urgently need a census, an audit or whatever—I am not precious. Such a thing used to happen once a year, but it could happen once every cycle—whatever the cycle is. We need to know where we stand with a census of local authority youth work. There is a mantra: “Unless you measure it, you can’t deliver it.” Until we measure the situation and audit it, we will not be able to assess where we are failing young people. I welcome the Minister’s responsibilities, but they must come with that auditing process.

We also recommended that each local authority should confirm a lead role responsible for the discharge of the statutory duty for youth work. Again, if local councils have a statutory duty but do not appoint a person who is responsible for delivering on that duty, it is almost impossible to hold them to account. Youth work is not a voluntary provision, because it has statutory underpinning. Although it is poorly defined, local authorities must show that they are discharging that duty. We recommended that the position should be probably equivalent to a deputy director of children’s services in the responsible local authority, which are upper-tier authorities, and they should be accountable for the duty, ensuring that council officers fully take charge.

Finally, the inquiry recommended that the Government should develop a youth workforce strategy, including the expectations for the ratio of professional youth workers, trainers and volunteers. We need a standardised national system to evaluate the sufficiency and suitability of youth services and the quality of youth work provision. That, of course, is where the National Youth Agency comes in.

We are currently relying on the NYA to oversee standards, qualifications, access, safeguarding and youth workforce development in the sector. Until last week, it did that without any Government funding. Prior to the coalition Government, the NYA had an annual budget of £10 million. Almost overnight, however, funding disappeared entirely, and it has done a tremendous job in the most difficult circumstances. It has had to limit not only the services that it is able to offer to councils, but voluntary services, too, and it has had to rely on private endowments, fees, and Canada and Australia, which continue to pay the NYA for the accreditation of their youth services. It should be a national scandal that a national institution designed to keep our young people safe was defunded in such a way, and that we have had to rely on the kindness, in effect, of Commonwealth countries to continue funding a service offered here in Britain. Although I am pleased that the Minister has said there will be some commitment to the National Youth Agency in some of the workforce reviews, £800,000 is too little compared with where we were, and it is definitely too late for the young people who have missed out on opportunities.

Part of the NYA’s role was to provide the audit I mentioned of youth services around the country—something that was lost when its funding went. That needs to be urgently reinstated, and I hope the Minister will either find resources from her Department or push the Treasury to sufficiently fund not only blanket audits but the ability to do one-off spot checks—sometimes we can address these issues by picking up where we think there are problems and by delving in. In over five years, Ofsted has not inspected any youth provision in this country; it is entitled to do that, and we could encourage it to do so to make sure that the fulfilment is there.

There can be no question but that youth services improve the lives of young people. They offer young people experiences outside formal education; they support, but do not replace, formal education; and they enhance readiness for learning in the classroom and learning in life. That is why professional qualifications for youth workers are so important. My ten-minute rule Bill early last year aimed to put youth work qualifications on a statutory footing. That, of course, does not devalue the work of current programmes such as the apprenticeship programme, which will hopefully come on stream—the Government have approved it, albeit late, but better late than never—and university programmes such as the fantastic one at the University of Brighton in my constituency, which ensures that our children and young people are supported by the people best qualified to understand their emotional and educational wellbeing.

We should be under no illusion about the dire state of youth work at the moment. I have been in and out of this sector most of my life. As in any sector, there is politics, with the voluntary sector having arguments with the professional sector, and at one point or another everyone falls out. However, what is remarkable now is that the sector—the youth workers, the voluntary organisations, the scouts and the guides—are saying almost with one voice that there is a crisis in many of our young people’s lives and we need to step up to support them. Those organisations are campaigning for the survival of much of the sector.

The Government must be held to account. Multiple youth work programmes have now closed their doors to new applicants across country. We have had the closure of 763 youth centres. Some 4,500 youth workers have lost their jobs, and their posts have been deleted. That has led to 140,000 places providing young people with access to youth services being lost. The sector is on its knees, and Members should not take my word for it. Research from the House of Commons Library shows that funding went from £1.2 billion in 2010 to £358 million in 2017. That is a 68% cut in cash terms, and almost £1 billion in real terms stripped from the sector. Many parts of the country now have no youth services at all provided through statutory provision.

So stark is the sense of bereftness felt by young people that 16 to 24-year-olds are now the largest demographic to feel lonely, with one in 10 saying they always or often feel lonely—far more than among the over-65s, whom we often associate with loneliness. When young people do reach out for help, those in my city alone can face a wait of 12 months to see a professional for their mental health, which then spirals down. In the very worst cases, as in my city in only the last few months, we see young people committing suicide. The Government need to take young people seriously.

In all societies, we have had people in the community who have supported us during transitions in our lives—at different points, we will all go through difficult transitions. Historically, since humanity began, that person may have been the village elder, the local imam or the local vicar. Having someone to help us with that process is vital. Youth workers were there to help young people make that transition. Quite rightly, at the turn of the last century, we moved away from a link between Church and state. We developed a professionalised programme, into which safeguarding was embedded, and we made sure that provision was based on need, not on a person’s religion. However, we have destroyed much of the provision that took the place of the role played by other bodies, and we have not replaced it with anything. We have not replaced it with community endeavour, because communities are facing other huge cuts.

That is not to say that there is no voluntary provision. I visited Wigan OnSide youth zone; we are hoping to get an OnSide centre in Brighton, and some great ones are opening up in London. There, we see qualified youth workers doing good, old-fashioned youth work, and it transforms communities, but this provision is not perfect, because it is city-centre-based. What we need in every community is voluntary engagement with young people, so that they have something to do, somewhere to go, and someone to speak to. Parents might be the best to love young people, but we need professional engagement to support young people through the difficult moments in their life.

I am pleased that the Government will introduce a charter, but will we make sure that every young person has somewhere to go, something to do and someone to speak to? If we do not, it can come as no surprise when knife crime and antisocial behaviour increase, and when county lines ravage our communities—although youth work will not in itself solve those issues. When cuts in social services, policing and youth work all come together, the result is communities bereft of support. There is a phrase in “The Shopkeeper’s Journal”: “You break it, you own it.” The reality is that this Government—not councils—defunded youth services. They broke it; they must fix it.