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Services for Young People

Thank you very much, Mr Betts, for calling me to speak. I congratulate the Education Committee on its report and its Chairman, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), on his opening speech. There is much that is excellent in the report, which contains a powerful critique of the Government's approach and other points that I hope the Minister will respond to. There have also been some excellent speeches from my hon. Friends the Members for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) and for North West Durham (Pat Glass), which were drawn from their considerable personal expertise and knowledge, both in their local communities and more widely, in the area of youth work. I also found much to agree with in the contribution that we have just heard from the hon. Member for Wells (Tessa Munt). What is clear from the Education Committee's report and from the speeches that we have heard today is that we all agree that youth services matter, and they matter most to the most vulnerable and to the most challenged communities. As my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham said, in the context of youth unemployment—with 250,000 young people who have been unemployed for more than a year and with 1.4 million under-25s who are not in education, employment or training—the value of youth services is even greater. Although it is completely correct that youth unemployment did not start in the spring of 2010, the fact that it has increased and is a major and consistent problem is all the more reason why greater care should have been taken, and should still be taken, to provide the funding and support for a youth service that is one strategy among a number of different strategies to help young people to cope with the tragic experience of unemployment. As my hon. Friend also said, the context of youth unemployment also includes the removal of education maintenance allowance. The removal of EMA matters not only because of education—this is not a debate about EMA itself and its value—but because young people need to be able to provide for themselves. That ability means gaining access not only to education, but to enrichment and support, which includes the youth service and the valuable application of young people's own leisure time. The fact that many young people are now being denied opportunities to attend enrichment activities in out-of-school programmes—for example, the opportunity to pay for the transport that the hon. Member for Wells referred to—is also relevant to the Select Committee's report. Young people whom I have spoken to were furious about the removal of EMA. I would say that it was probably the one aspect of policy that they felt even more strongly about than the raising of tuition fees for higher education. We have touched a little on the riots. It is absolutely right that we understand—we all do understand—that the riots did not occur because of cuts in youth services; no one is alleging that the riots occurred because of those cuts. However, the fact that youth services and the wide range of provision for young people have been under such pressure, particularly in some of our toughest urban communities, did not help. As two excellent reports—the London School of Economics report, ““Reading the Riots””, and the Children's Society report, ““Reporting the Riots””—indicate, the riots should be a warning to us not to neglect youth services even further in our most challenged communities. There are many important points in the Education Committee's report that Opposition and Government Members can agree on. We can all agree that youth services, or services for young people, span a much wider range of activities than the statutory youth service framework. We have heard examples of excellent practice in a range of community, faith, sporting and, of course, privately-supported and business-supported activities, which form part of the life opportunities for many young people. Indeed, statutory youth work itself covers a variety of different activities, ranging from outreach to youth clubs and from school-based youth work to careers guidance. Of course, there is also the national citizenship service, which I will refer to later. It is right that we appreciate the range of those activities and that we look to have a different pattern of services and activities in different types of community. What will be effective in a constituency in inner London, such as my own, will not be the right mix for communities in rural areas, the north of England and so forth. What we need to do—the Education Committee's report certainly implies this if it does not explicitly state it—is do better at mapping the range of activities that are accessible and available to young people, so that we have a better understanding of the context within which our statutory youth services operate. That leads us to something that came out strongly in the speech by the Chairman of the Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness—namely, that we have a real problem with the quality of data, both on inputs and outcomes. Better quality of data would enable us to make better judgments about the quality and value of youth services. Data about inputs are of only limited value, but they are none the less important. My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan made a request for a better and more consistent data set, so that we can look at what has happened to the funding of statutory youth services over a decade, and she was absolutely right to do so. Within that context, however, the absorption of so many different youth services programmes into the early intervention grant has made it even harder to get a handle on what is happening to the funding of statutory youth services. The Minister should help us to address that problem. It is a central point of the Education Committee's report that we lack rigour in understanding what works. That is not a new problem for this Government, but we do not have the data set to enable us to make better judgments about what works in terms of quality and outcome. The Minister has promised that he will respond to those points, and I hope he will. He needs to convince us that the Government have a strategy to ensure that services for young people are delivering and to monitor how they are delivering, so that we can make proper judgments about what works. What we do have a good idea about is the scale of the cuts in youth services funding over the last couple of years. We know that there has been a real-terms 20% cut in the early intervention grant and that around half of local authorities have cut their youth services in the last two years, with Conservative and Liberal Democrat councils making the biggest cuts overall. We also know that those cuts are disproportionate to the local government average and that about £200 million worth of cuts will have been made to youth services by April this year. In some cases, that means that centres are closing, but it also means that youth workers have lost their jobs. Around 3,000 youth workers are at risk of losing their jobs, which means that even those centres that can remain open are providing a much lower level of service. The House of Commons Library has analysed some of this information about the cuts for me. In some cases, local authorities have cut 100% of their youth provision. For example, Kingston upon Thames has cut 100% of its youth provision; Peterborough 89%; Westminster 70%; Bracknell Forest 48%; and so forth. There is a long list of local authorities that have cut their youth provision; they are not all Conservative or Liberal Democrat-controlled authorities, but there is a strong bias in that direction. From the evidence that was given to the Select Committee and subsequently from the publication of Positive for Youth, the Government's youth strategy, we know that the leading national organisations in the youth service field challenge the Minister's claim that large slugs of money have been spent on youth services, and they question what that actually means. We have had the figures that support their concern. We have heard today, and the Select Committee report draws out, a worry that the national citizenship service, the aspirations of and principle behind which no one is challenging, potentially eats up a disproportionate volume of such scarce resources as are available. My local authority is one of the pilots, and I have found out that last year just 60 young people participated in the programme and, most worryingly for the Minister, only a third of them were on free school meals. In an ideal world we would all be happy to support the scheme, but when resources are so tightly constrained it is extremely worrying that we provide so much money for a scheme for such a small number of young people—it will be a bigger number this summer, but still tiny proportionately—such a small proportion of whom are from lower-income backgrounds.