Funding for Youth Services

Yasmin Qureshi Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins) on introducing this absolutely fantastic and timely debate. I endorse her comments and those that my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) just made, including the figures and statistics that he provided about the challenges that we have with our youth services and with what is happening to young people, especially from working-class and poorer communities. He described a picture very similar to what is happening in my constituency of Bolton South East, which, in the indices of social deprivation, is 38th in the country, so I genuinely thank him for the facts and figures that he highlighted. I will not repeat them, but I agree with everything that my two colleagues said.

Many other Members will touch on this later. We know that youth centres and places like them provide support to young people as safe places to socialise, develop and learn new skills and gain new experiences. In Bolton, we are blessed with many fantastic youth services that do amazing work, but they are all voluntary. I have seen at first hand how these groups allow children in Bolton to go on trips that they might not normally go on, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North said, or to gain access to sports facilities, music and art equipment—an experience that they would not otherwise get.

We have national groups such as the YMCA and the Scouts, which are doing fantastic work in Bolton. The YMCA has just invested £6.1 million in its new Y-Pad building, which is providing community space and housing for young people leaving foster care. They are another group of young people whom we ignore massively; we do not have full and proper provision for them when they leave foster care. Those groups are filling gaps left by the cuts to local authority and Government budgets. We have also seen brilliant local services such as the Bolton Lads & Girls Club, Be The Change, in Farnworth, and Zac’s Youth Bar, in Kearsley. These services are driven by local need and run by dedicated volunteers.

These organisations and their volunteers help in combating antisocial behaviour and improving young people’s mental and physical health. Why, then, have we seen a stark reduction in their funding? The benefits of youth services are very clear. It is also clear that they are undervalued and have not been funded properly since 2010. In addition, as a result of covid, the levels of stress and mental health problems for young people have increased massively. Along with the elderly, they were one of the groups that in some respects suffered the most.

We need a sea change in the Government’s approach to youth services. Young people are a very easy target. We often hear that they are lazy, are glued to their Xbox, are social media addicts and other expressions of that nature, when we know that that is not correct. We need there to be safe outdoor and indoor spaces to enable young people to play sports, socialise and engage with the real world.

[Sarah Dyke]

I thank the hon. Member for allowing my intervention. Volunteer-led Somerton library has recently been highlighted as excellent in a review of public libraries. It plays, as the hon. Member was suggesting, a crucial role in engaging young people. However, the national crisis in local authorities’ finances will threaten the future provision of libraries in places around the country, such as Somerton. Does she agree that this is a vital service, and that we need to ensure that our local authorities are adequately funded to provide those crucial services for young people and wider communities?

--- Later in debate ---

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I totally agree with the hon. Lady. We need properly funded youth services because they are the key to unlock the potential of many young people, especially in communities like mine. The young are our future. Most of us here are heading towards retirement—well, some are. We need young people to be the workers providing for us in 10, 15, and 20 years’ time. We need to invest in them because they are our future. If we do not want to do it for a moral reason, let us do it because of straightforward economic reality. We need good young people who have been trained properly and educated, and are able to look after themselves and contribute to our society.

I will end on one particular aspect of youth services. Throughout my life as a barrister practising in criminal law, I dealt with many young people coming through the criminal justice system. A lot of them had problems within their families, or were subject to violence or abuse, and had an addiction problem. Over the past 10 years or so, we have seen a massive reduction in provision for rehabilitation centres for drug and alcohol intoxication. At the moment, trying to get a place in drug or alcohol rehab can take months and months. I ask the Government to look at this, because when some young people unfortunately end up in the criminal justice system, it is often because of an addiction to alcohol and drugs. There are not facilities at the other end to help wean them off this drug and alcohol addiction. I hope the Minister is listening to us, and I hope that we get some real commitment to providing funding to youth services and to tackling the issues of drug and alcohol rehabilitation centres.