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Services for Young People

I think that the sum of the bureaucracy around small charities in particular is already being addressed. I just referenced the work that we are doing with Business in the Community, NCB and that consortium to provide a portal for organisations that need funding, advice on how to get leverage on the funds and resources available, and on how to partner up different organisations. That is what we are trying to create in that brokerage, and I think that that addresses the concern. There have been quite a lot of myths about national citizen service. It has been covered disproportionately, at least in the press releases relating to the Committee's report. I would be more than happy if the Committee produced a discrete report on national citizen service that was based on the evidence that we are amassing from people who have already been on it, and based on actually going on the projects and seeing the young people and the providers. The Chair of the Select Committee has met some of his local providers, and I think he was impressed by what he saw. Let me first say what national citizen service is not. It is not just some six week summer camp—that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is all about. National citizen service is about a life-changing experience that starts with a two-and-a-half week window, mostly over the summer, with young people going on an outward bound type course and being thrown in at the deep end—quite literally in many cases. It gets people together from different sides of the tracks socially and ethnically—kids who have been in the youth justice system, kids from independent schools, kids with disabilities. It mixes them all up and they have to rely on each other and understand each other. It is about a rite of passage as well. Anybody who has been through the national citizen service course and graduated—it is not a walk in the park; it needs to be stretching and it needs to be challenging—has earned the right to be treated more as an adult. It is about engaging those young people with society in the longer term. It is about getting them embarked on volunteering activities. It is about getting them to develop their social action project, which they start up as part of the summer experience, and which will hopefully run for months, if not years, after that, in collaboration with other local youth organisations, the local council and local businesses. I want thousands of signs around the country that read, ““National citizen service project initiated by, run by, managed by, inspired by young people””, so that even some of the most cynical people in our society, who think that every teenager is a potential hoodie-wearing mugger, will have to say, ““Wow, there is some really good stuff going on in my town, my village, my community, my city, and it is being led by young people.”” That is what national citizen service is all about. I do not recognise some of the figures in the report that have been attached to national citizen service, simply because they are not figures that we have calculated ourselves. We are in the middle of a pilot. We are evolving the scheme. We have made a number of changes since we started the pilots. We will be rolling out 30,000 places this summer, and there will be some variations. Some will be run over a series of extended weekends for those who cannot commit for the summer. There will be some pilots in Northern Ireland, because this will be a UK-wide exercise.