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Services for Young People

We could have a debate about EMA—indeed, I have been part of such debates—but it is not part of the youth report. If the hon. Lady would like to talk about EMA, I will mention that, last night, I was with a group of young people who are in the care system and who have benefited disproportionately from the alternative to EMA—the higher education bursary. They will gain more under that bursary than they did under EMA. We could have that completely different argument, but I think you would rule us out of order, Mr Betts. I want to try to address some of the points that the Select Committee Chairman raised, particularly the one about the statutory duty. We have published the consultation on what we will do about the statutory duty, and I have sent out very strong, clear signals regarding some of the disproportionate cuts that we have seen. As the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) acknowledged, I have absolutely admitted that, in certain parts of the country, some councils are being short-sighted in treating youth services as soft targets. They are not taking a long-term view about the implications of such an approach. We are consulting on what, practically, the statutory duty should mean. We have had it since 1996, but it has never been used. If we are to have such a duty, it must be meaningful and something that people will appreciate. However, a very important point comes out of Positive for Youth in relation to the fact that local authorities and others are part of the youth offer. To believe that youth services are provided by local authorities alone is a mistake. The youth offer includes, as several hon. Members have mentioned, a load of different organisations that involve local authorities, social enterprises, voluntary organisations, charities and private companies, yet we focus disproportionately on how much money local authorities invest in certain youth-orientated services. The bigger picture shows that the offer is much more mixed. The best judges of whether or not young people get a good deal in their local area must surely be young people themselves. That is why a key part of the Positive for Youth strategy is the need for an effective and loud youth voice. I have asked every local authority in the country to identify a group of young people locally. They may be youth mayors, members of the UK Youth Parliament, youth cabinet members, none of those or even a combination of them. Such groups could be legitimately said to represent the voices and concerns of young people in their communities. They would be able to conduct an audit of the youth offer in their area and have it taken seriously, published on the local authority's website or presented to a council meeting. We will collate those findings and flag up where certain local areas are doing well and where others are not. Surely, that is the best way to find out whether or not young people are getting a good deal and to do something about areas with a weakness. The Committee Chairman also mentioned the outcomes framework. The further response that we gave to the Committee—we have done this in the past few months—stated that my Department is funding the Catalyst consortium"““to develop its outcomes framework with the ambition that it will become an 'industry standard' common language with which to measure and demonstrate the impact of provision.””" We have also been working with the Young Foundation, which is part of the Catalyst consortium, to develop the outcomes framework, which is a matrix of tools that will help youth organisations to demonstrate their impact on outcomes for young people. The interesting problem with this work is how to prove a negative. This is something else that goes to the heart of what Positive for Youth is all about—it says it on the tin. Too often in the past, we have judged whether or not we are doing well for young people in terms of preventatives and negatives. We ask questions such as ““How many young people have we prevented from going to youth offender institutions? How many teenage pregnancies have we prevented? How many young people are not in the youth justice system?”” Those questions are all based on negatives and preventatives, so it is not surprising that they exacerbate the negative images of young people that the media too often present. I want to achieve—this is why we have asked the Catalyst consortium to consider the issue—an aspirational, positive measure of outcomes that assesses what we are doing for young people on the basis of what they achieve, their educational success and a version of the Prime Minister's well-being index. It is hugely difficult to put together something that is meaningful, measureable and practical, but I am determined to do that and to replace the negatives with something positive and aspirational. It will take a while to come up with something that does not just consist of words that are relatively meaningless. The hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) made a number of points on a wide range of issues. It is a shame that she was not present when I gave evidence to the Committee on the national citizen service and on Positive for Youth. Had she been present, she would have received answers to some of the questions that she has asked today. The hon. Lady was right to say that part of the problem with youth work is that there is no real job description for it. I know that one of the Committee's frustrations was the failure of often well-established youth organisations to make a positive, strong case for what constitutes good youth work and a good youth worker. The sector does not do itself any favours. I have seen some fantastic youth workers making a huge difference to young people—often from disadvantaged backgrounds—throughout the country. I wish that we could bottle that work, define it and replicate it more. That is why Positive for Youth is littered with case studies of youth organisations, local authorities and young people themselves doing some really good stuff in different parts of the country. I want to disseminate best practice and we also need to find a way to disseminate good youth work. I know that the Select Committee Chairman is as frustrated as I am that the Committee's report did not suggest a blueprint for how to promote good youth work practice. The sector has received that message, which is why Fiona Blacke and the National Youth Agency are working on whether we should have a professional body of youth workers and on how we can increase the standing, gravitas and perceptions of youth workers. The hon. Lady mentioned reliance on different sources of funding. During my evidence to the Committee—she was not present—I referred to a heavy reliance on ““slugs of public money””. My point was not that there is too much or too little public money going to youth services, but that those services have relied disproportionately on public money in the past. A degree of reform in a range of other public services has resulted in a mixed economy of provision based on different revenue sources, but youth services are too often heavily reliant on money from local government, whether it comes via central Government or elsewhere. There is a whole range of other providers, but there is still a heavy reliance on public money, so when public finances are tight, youth services get hit disproportionately. Frankly, the situation has not changed dramatically since the Albemarle report 50 years ago, which effectively established youth services. The hon. Lady gave a good example from her own constituency of the upcoming Wigan youth zone and the contribution of Martin Ainscough, whom I have met several times. He is a fantastic philanthropist and has put together a fantastic case, as have other members of the OnSide charity, which is responsible for four Myplace centres in the north-west. The charity's genesis was in the Bolton lads and girls club, which is one of the best—if not the best—youth centres in the country, if not the world. Martin works with Dave Whelan, who is another benefactor of the project. It did not qualify for Myplace funding, because it submitted its bid after the funding round had finished, unlike the other four Myplace centres, most of which have opened—I opened one in Carlisle—and are doing some fantastic work. The Wigan example did not, therefore, get any national public money, but it is going ahead because of some contribution from the local authority and generous contributions from Martin Ainscough, Dave Whelan and other businesses. Martin runs a private business, which, as the hon. Lady knows, is a big employer in Wigan and has been there for many years. He rightly sees himself as part of the local community and as having a corporate, social responsibility to it. He has identified a mutual benefit of a Myplace-style youth centre—I am hugely supportive of such centres and will come on to them in a moment—whereby his employees spend time volunteering to help out there. His employees' sons and daughters will benefit from the centre's facilities, and he may well end up employing some of them. He will help to provide training facilities. It is not just a place for youth leisure activities, but a meeting place for training and education, personal and social development, and all sorts of other things. That is being achieved regardless of the availability of a big pot of money from central Government funds. The model is hugely successful. The Myplace centres—which are based on the OnSide model—that will thrive most of all are those that become self-sustaining and encourage a host of other providers that use social enterprises, businesses and the voluntary sector to become self-sustaining, too. Wigan is a fantastic example of where it can work. I am particularly keen on other forms of funding for youth organisations—I have been encouraged and we have some brokerage work to help with this—through the social investment bank. We have put some money into a consortium led by NCB and Business in the Community to act as a brokerage to encourage new sources of funding for youth organisations that are looking to promote such projects. The hon. Lady also mentioned the problem of having 27 different sources of funding and having to account for them all, which is, of course, complete nonsense. That needs to be streamlined and we are streamlining the accountability frameworks. However, those 27 sources of funding may be, as with many projects I have visited, all from different public sources of finance—Department of Health, Home Office or Department for Education projects. Even if they were 100% funded, they would not be from one pot of money that requires one report, one accountability framework and one inspection a year, but 27 funds with potentially 27 reports. That is nonsense that we need to streamline, but it happens in the public sector just as much as it will happen if we have multiple sources of funding from private voluntary and social enterprise sectors, too.