Youth Service Provision

Yvonne Fovargue Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) on securing the debate and on his opening speech. He is right to situate what has happened to youth services in the context of what has happened to support for and the focus on young people over the past few years. Support has collapsed in some areas where it is most needed. He mentioned the education maintenance allowance and the careers service among other things. The speeches and interventions made by my hon. Friends show how strongly Labour feels about youth services and demonstrate our commitment to ensuring that all young people have access to a high-quality, open-access and appropriately funded youth service.

We believe that it is important to set that benchmark because of what we have seen happening in recent years, with huge pressures being placed on local authority budgets, but we are not prescriptive about how it should be delivered locally, or what it should look like. However, where we are clear and where we perhaps differ from this Government—unless the Minister is going to say something very exciting in his closing speech—is in our belief the Government have a clear role in ensuring that that offer to young people is made clear to local government and is delivered in every community around the country. I agreed with much of what the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) said. The difficulty is that what we have seen over the years is that some local authorities absolutely get this issue and understand it, but not all. The key question for national Government is what to do when that commitment is not being delivered in some local areas where people simply do not get it.

My own local authority, Wigan, has had real challenges with this. We have had the third worst budget cuts in the entire country, but the fact that there are three MPs in Westminster Hall today who represent parts of that borough—my hon. Friends the Members for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) and for Bolton West (Julie Hilling), and myself—shows that there is a strong commitment from us as elected politicians to try to protect those services.

One of the exciting things that has happened in Wigan in the past few years is the youth zone that we have managed to set up. It is an example of some of the things that Members have talked about today. It is a way of doing things differently, because it is a partnership between the OnSide charity, the local authority, local entrepreneurs and businesses, the community, and, most important of course, young people themselves, who have been involved from the outset in campaigning for this service, designing it and now running it, as well as using it. It is not the beginning and end of the whole story in terms of the youth services that we need in our borough, but it is a real achievement at a time when the local authority budget in particular and the community are under such strain.

[Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend join me in welcoming the free bus service that runs from my area, which is an outlying area of the borough? The authorities recognised that young people from the outlying areas of the borough were not using that service, and they have done something immediately to try to solve that problem.

[Lisa Nandy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight that, and it is one of the reasons why I congratulated my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North for situating this debate in the wider context of what is happening to young people. Transport costs are the key thing that young people always raise with me and, I am sure, many other Members, and it is important that we think about that when we consider services for young people.

There are some other startling examples of local authorities doing something really exciting. The hon. Member for Brigg and Goole is right to acknowledge the impact that the cuts have had but also to say that this is not just about funding. For example, I think that many Members will be aware of a project in Lambeth that I have heard about and seen for myself. Lambeth took the huge amounts that it was spending on young people through various budgets and put it into a trust, which anyone in the community over the age of 12 could join. It was weighted towards young people, so that they retained control, and it gave the community the power to take real decisions about how services were commissioned and delivered and what they looked like. My understanding is that that project has been a remarkable success. It points to a key feature of successful youth services; the most successful ones are those that involve young people in commissioning, designing and delivering them, where possible.

However, we know from our experience of looking at youth services that what works in Lambeth does not necessarily work in Liverpool. That is why I have said that there needs to be a clear minimum offer from this Government. Labour is clearly committed to that, but not to prescription about on how it should be delivered. Labour Members have previously said that we are open to strengthening the statutory duty to provide youth services, and I have listened carefully to the contributions by hon. Members on that point, but I think we must recognise that, on its own, a statutory duty is not enough. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West said, we already have a statutory duty, limited though it is, and it is not being fulfilled around the country. Labour is very attracted by the possibility of introducing a duty to ensure that young people are involved from the outset in designing and commissioning youth services, and we wonder whether the Minister might share that aspiration; if he does, perhaps he will say something about it today.

There is also a clear need to ensure that young people can hold the people who make these decisions to account. That is one of the reasons why Labour is committed to introducing votes at 16. I hope that the Minister will listen to that argument and consider carefully how young people can hold their elected politicians to account for their decisions if they do not have the vote.

I should also mention briefly concerns about the work force. I want to be fair to the Minister, so I will say that some of the problems in the youth service work force predate the coalition. In 2008, a survey by the National Youth Agency found that a third of councils were not investing at all in the professional development of youth workers. That was really worrying then, but I dread to think what the figure is now, several years after the huge cuts that we have had. Can the Minister tell us? There is a real risk that we will run down the quality of our services and then turn around and say to young people that those services are not worth saving in any case.

There is no question that the last four years have been absolutely horrendous for this sector, and I do not want to lose sight of that. We have lost good, skilled staff, and many more are under significant strain, dealing with low pay, job insecurity and the prospect of redundancies. This really matters, because as my hon. Friends the Members for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) and for Stockton North said, behind the loss of all those youth workers—2,000 of them during the last few years—is a story of broken relationships. I once worked with a young person who had grown up in and out of care. He was 18 when I first came across him and he told me that the only consistent adult in his life since he was 11 had been his youth worker. When we lose good, skilled staff, we break that link and that bond, and the damage is irreparable.

Regarding the National Citizen Service, I say to the Minister that although I support many of the things that my hon. Friends have said, and I myself have also had a parmo with some of the young people from Redcar who have taken part in NCS, it is no substitute for long-term, ongoing youth services provided all year round. It is a short-term intervention and it is very expensive. If we come to power in May next year, we are not planning to make the same mistake that this Government did with the v scheme, and simply tear something up because another party has established it, but we are very concerned about the cost of NCS. My hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North drew a parallel between the amount of money that the German Federal Government spend on year-round youth work and the money that this Government spend on short-term interventions.

The other thing to say is that young people spend 85% of their time out of school, yet each year local authorities spend 55 times more on formal education than they do on providing services for young people outside the school day. We need to get a bit of a grip on this, because when this Government agreed to protect ring-fencing for school funding they did not do the same for additional activities. They abolished ring-fenced grants for—