Young Adults: Public Service Funding

In a recent report, Choose Childhood, the charity Action for Children reflects that, according to children, parents and grandparents, childhood has changed. There have been advances in health, domestic legislation and social housing. Despite this, many children and young people today still face life-changing disadvantages and there are,

“worrying signs … that some of the progress made is at risk of being reversed”.

Mental health needs have increased; child poverty has grown and is projected to rise to 5 million by 2022. Children at risk of abuse and neglect are not getting the support they need and remain on the edges of social care. Children are concerned about safer streets and the risk of crime.

I refer first to funding for families and communities and child poverty—a devastating and counterproductive thing for a child and his or her family. Some problems arise, not through policies set at local levels but because of national funding policies on, for example, benefits. One example is the two-child limit, which came into effect in 2017. New research by the Child Poverty Action Group and the Church of England estimates that 160,000 families and 600,000 children have been affected by this policy and that more than 800,000 families will eventually be affected. They will be £4,000 worse off on average as a result. As I said earlier, child poverty as a whole is increasing.

Between 2010 and 2019, 585 Sure Start children’s centres closed. These centres provided community support systems for parents and children within pram-pushing distance—but, I am afraid, no longer. Between 2012 and 2019, 763 youth centres closed. The Government have stated that money has been put into the connections service and youth activities such as the UK Youth Parliament. This is all to the good but it is not the same as having a fixture, such as a youth centre, where young people can go for recreation, structured activity, support and advice.

Spending on local libraries has decreased and some have closed. In 2015, a BBC News survey found that more than £42 million has been axed from council sports and leisure centres since 2010. Local authority spending overall has decreased year on year since 2013-14 from just over £90 million to almost £88 million.

Others will speak about schools but we know from head teachers of dramatic shortfalls in funding affecting schools in terms of the upkeep of buildings and spending on equipment for young people. The most vulnerable are suffering. The National Education Union has reported that special needs provision in England has lost out on £1.2 billion because of shortfalls in funding from central government since 2015, while the number of those who have legal entitlement to funding for support has risen by almost 100,000 in the corresponding period.

With such a diminution of community structures, an increase in family difficulties, increasing homelessness and a lack of affordable housing, we should not be surprised at the increase in gang culture and its attendant crimes such as knife crime, particularly in inner cities. It is true that the number of people entering the youth justice system has decreased dramatically. The number of first-time entrants has gone down by 86% since March 2008 but knife and weapon offences have increased, as have the number of young people in custody. Almost 41% of children and young people reoffend. The number of arrests of children and young people has decreased but at different rates: 82% for white children and only 56% for black children. This uneven figure calls for dramatic efforts to investigate the reasons and provide resources to tackle the difference.

Two-thirds of local councils have cut funding for sexual and reproductive health services, according to a freedom of information request carried out by the Advisory Group on Contraception. Funding constraints are increasing health inequality, with 60% of councils in areas of high deprivation planning further cuts. Public Health England has estimated that each £1 spent on publicly funded contraception alone will save over £9 in the next 10 years in local authority and NHS budgets. Brook advisory centres, which provide free and confidential sexual health information, including on contraception, are concerned that specialist services for young people are at risk. This is not only about contraception; it is about protection from sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. All this is costly and distressing for those affected. Money needs to be spent earlier but sometimes the money is not there. However, I am glad that the Government have agreed to make sexuality and relationships education mandatory in schools from next year. Young people have the right to information and emotional support to develop healthy sexual relationships, and schools need to be backed up by support services in the community.

Substance misuse—alcohol or drugs, and sometimes self-medication—is a form of risky behaviour and often a cry for help. Services for young people are commissioned by local authorities. A Children’s Society review, which took into account the views of young people, found concern that the resourcing of wider children’s and young people’s services has suffered in some local authority areas from reductions in the public health grant since 2013. This represents an enormous challenge for such services. There was evidence that expenditure on drug and alcohol services for young people had been reduced. Again, early intervention to prevent the use of alcohol and drugs is important and saves money in the long term.

Child criminal exploitation is the grooming of children into criminality. It is an area where there is a huge absence of data from the police and local authorities, yet the Children’s Commissioner has warned that between 30,000 and 50,000 children could be affected. A report by the Children’s Society found that only half of local authorities said they had collected data. This has led to a lack of knowledge about the criminalisation of children being forced to sell drugs, and gangs are exploiting the situation. This is one case where the Government must address the shortfall in funding for children’s social care and provide sufficient funding to bring in early help for vulnerable children.

A recent research report on vulnerable children from the Children’s Commissioner states that,

“for too long we have focused only on managing demand for services instead of asking what helps these children lead happy, successful lives”.

This has resulted in increased spending on late, short-term, expensive and ineffective intervention. It seems that planning for services has been affected by a lack of certainty about funding in the long term. The report estimates that about £10 billion will be required by 2025 to make a meaningful difference. The expansion should include an expansion of community-level services to help children and families.

I praised the voluntary sector earlier. I am impressed by the announcement this year by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, that there will be new money from City Hall’s Young Londoners Fund for youth projects and programmes. In the last round of funding, more than 450 applications seeking an investment of over £120 million were received from projects that support children and young people aged between 10 and 21.

I repeat and stress the importance of early and consistent intervention to help children, families and young adults. Too often, we seem to work in piecemeal ways; this can be disorganised and disruptive for local councils and the people who inhabit communities. What is the Government’s policy on funding local authorities? Is it on the basis of need? How it is calculated? What are the challenges? What increases in funding are foreseen? I ask the Government to develop, with stakeholders, a strategy for children and young people to pull the strands together. We cannot afford to put at risk the health, welfare and lives of this crucial population, the citizens of now and of the future. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

A study by Action for Children, Barnardo’s and the NSPCC says:

“Funding available per child … for all children’s services”,

in England has fallen from,

“£813 in 2010-11 to £553 in 2017-18”.

The facts speak for themselves.

Councils in London have suffered the worst cuts, with northern cities not far behind. All services have now been pared down. There has been an inevitable and necessary shift to focus on statutory services, at the expense of preventative services, to deal with young people in crisis, rather than young people who are perhaps in a bit of trouble, or who are struggling, or who are in need of the right kind of services to stop them from getting to that point at all.

It is, however, becoming increasingly hard to look at the facts and not see some cause and effect. Has this reduction in spend on young people, for instance, meant that knife crime has increased? Who can say for sure? However, one thing any sensible person can say with certainty is that services to support the transition to adulthood of many tens of thousands of our youngsters have reduced or are non-existent. This is well evidenced, and it is not fantasy to hypothesise that, taken all together across an area—whether that area is a village, a small town or a large city—young people’s lives are being impoverished and lack of support for them must be affecting their lives.

Councils should be given the resources they need to work with young people and prevent their involvement in crime rather than picking up the pieces after the offences have been committed. Even then, at the sharp end, there has been a significant reduction in the youth offending teams. These were working well in co-ordinating a response in partnership with the police and probation, social and education services, and others, with significant results in cutting local crime and supporting vulnerable young people. The government grant to YOTs has been cut from £145 million in 2010-11 to £72 million in 2017-18.

The recent report from the Children’s Commissioner for England revealed that there,

“are some worrying trends. Mainstream and acute services such as age 4-16 education and provision for children in care have been protected at the expense of targeted preventative services, removing vital safety nets for some very vulnerable children. The 60% cut in Sure Start and youth services will see an increasing number of vulnerable children fall through the gaps”.

I believe that this is already happening. The cuts that have happened gradually, over nearly a decade, are now showing their cumulative impact. Councils are overspending, have raised council tax to the limit that they are allowed to by Government, increased fees and charges, and have used their reserves to prop up essential services.

Youngsters do not arrive in crisis overnight, and many could be prevented from getting to that point if we helped them sooner and in a more effective way. There is much research to be done. We are in effect trying to manage and contain crisis in children’s lives after allowing it to escalate.

If we continue to see greater numbers of youngsters marginalised, the cost to the state will be greater. But it is the lifetime cost to these young people that we should be most troubled by; they have only one childhood and one chance to grow up into healthy and productive citizens. We see the cost of this lack of preventive work in increasing current pressures on children in care, family courts, special schools and special educational needs and disability provision in general, and in spiralling numbers of school exclusions and the consequent increase in younger children linked to violent street gangs.

Could the Minister point to ways in which the Government are looking to work out of government silos to build cross-cutting departmental services, built around a clear evidence base of the unmet needs of children? Do we know what really works? Do we have the right kind of data? I am particularly interested to know what will happen to the recently discredited Troubled Families programme, and its funding, when it ceases in 2020. For local government, the new fairer funding formula and the decision to omit deprivation from it has caused serious concerns. Could the Minister reassure us that funding will be matched to the likely level of need when the new regime finally comes in?

It is vital that the Government heed the consistent and increasing warning that children’s services are now at tipping point. Will the Government commit to using the upcoming spending review to deliver a long-term strategy that enables councils to meet the growing need for support for some of the most vulnerable in society—our young people?

Without wanting to guess the Minister’s response, I suspect he might say that there has been protection for some services. That argument is made by his ministerial colleagues regarding schools: the school budget has been protected, while there is an acceptance that other areas of funding have been cut. I want to make the argument that there are two reasons why that is not effective. The first and very simple reason is that even the priorities, which are usually the statutory services, have been underfunded; no recognition has been made of the extra demand that has been put on those services. The irony is that, in a time of austerity, the demand for those services increases. Even if budgets are kept the same or increased for inflation, they end up being underfunded because the increased need is not taken into account.

The second reason is slightly different, and here I want to make some further points. Having been a teacher for a number of years and a politician for a number of years, my experience is that services have got to work together; that is what makes the difference. That is never more true than for those services aimed at children and young adults. Forget the point about extra demand; even if one accepts the Government’s argument that they are safeguarding the priority services, or statutory services, there are implications if that is done in an otherwise underfunded system. It is those implications, as well as the drop in funding, that are causing the problem. For instance, the figures provided by the Library show it is true that there seems to be an increase in funding for safeguarding children, in young people’s services and for looked-after children. Ministers have made the decision that, in these tough times, they will do their best to safeguard those budgets. However, if one looks at the same set of figures, one sees that there is a decrease in Sure Start, a decrease in services for children under five and a decrease in the amount of money going into youth justice. One feeds into the other: it is no good protecting services that safeguard children and young people if you then cut those things that enable professionals to do a better job with these vulnerable young people.

I see the same in schools. I suspect that a fair amount of money has been put into maths and literacy teaching in schools. The maths hubs and the maths mastery programme are really good, and they are costed. I go around schools and see good work there, but because money has gone into some things and not others, there are no art, music or citizenship classes; there are no opportunities to go away overnight or go outside for play. The overall effect is that children’s learning is not as effective as it could be. You cannot pump money into teaching children maths and English and, at the same time, deny them the rest of the curriculum and think that there will not be a consequence.

In a strange way, the notion of priorities does not work, because a consequence of those priorities is an even greater underfunding of the services that would help deliver them better. If services are not funded, often it is not that they do not get delivered but that those in the workforce, at the cutting edge, have to find a way of taking on the extra burden. This is certainly the case in schools.

It can be argued that school budgets have been protected, and I would grant that that is probably the case in primary schools. Yet when I go to primary schools, teachers are not telling me that they are ever so glad that the Government have protected their budget—no one has ever said that to me. It is not that they are bashing the Tories; it is what they feel in their everyday lives. The children who come their way are suffering from money being cut in other areas. If there is less money in family support, it is the teachers who take on the job. Mums and dads who would have gone to an advice centre for help now come to the head teacher and the child’s teacher. If children suffer mental health through difficulties at home, and money is being cut from that service, they come to schools and expect them to deal with it. If children have poor housing but the neighbourhood housing advice centre has been cut, parents end up at school saying that they have not enough money to feed the children or for school uniforms.

One of the biggest backward steps is that, because of this cut in funding, we have a situation in which teachers have had to go back to being social workers, advice workers and carers. Under the Labour Government, they were free to teach, and that is why standards increased. It is no good protecting the schools budget if teachers are telling us that they are picking up the consequences of underfunded services. There is no capacity in the system. There is no joy. There are no spare minutes in which you can make some decisions about what to do differently and what to do next. It is a pressurised system. Even areas that the Government claim to have funded end up being not as effective as they might be; the Government certainly get no credit for this.

Further—and this is the greatest evidence that this is an argument worth making—I cannot see what policy the Government have to deliver integrated services. They have given up on delivering integrated services, because they are putting money into only a few of those services. They do not claim to be delivering integrated services. The Labour Government did that through Every Child Matters and children’s centres. I do not mind if you do not want to do it that way —I am not saying that it was perfect—but it was an acknowledgement and recognition that there has to be a structure to try to deliver integrated services to children and young adults. If you do not like that one, invent another. If the Minister accepts that integrated services are key to effective service delivery, can he explain how his Government are doing that?

I will finish where we started. One of our biggest obligations—as adults, politicians and policymakers—is to do what we can to make sure that the next generation has the best possible start in life. We cannot do it by ourselves, but I tell you what: politicians are pretty demanding of other agencies and individuals about discharging their responsibilities to children and young adults. If you look at what has happened to public services for young adults, you will see that the political policies are found wanting.

The study proved that for every $1 that the Government of the USA spent on early childhood education, they saved $7 over the coming years. Delinquency and early pregnancy rates were reduced and children were more likely to be highly educated and with higher earning power, and they were better able to ensure a good education from early childhood to university for their own children. I was able to persuade the director of HighScope to establish a similar system in the UK. We must have intervention in our education system for resources for early childhood education in the UK. It will save money in the long term.

My own instinct is that many successful people over the years have sent their children to private nursery schools to prepare them for their education in the long term. But those who are poor are unable to send their young children to a private nursery school.

Science tells us that a child between the ages of three and five learns quickly when given the opportunity to learn from good teachers. The state does not provide early childhood education for all young children as a statutory right. The time has come for the state to introduce early childhood education for all as a policy. Will the Minister tell the House what level of funding is being provided for early childhood education and whether all children aged three to five receive the benefit of early childhood education as a right? If that is not the case, will the Minister please bring in legislation that makes early childhood education compulsory for all?

There is one further area I would like to speak about: support for people with autism and their families. Colleagues in the Council of Europe, on which both my noble friend Lady Massey and I serve, are working on a report on this very matter. Britain is a world leader in legalisation specifically supporting people with autism, thanks to the hard work of Dame Cheryl Gillan in the other place. She, with the help of the National Autistic Society, of which I am a vice-president, piloted the passage of the Autism Act, and this year marks its 10th anniversary. Yet, despite some progress, we know that in many areas councils are not meeting their obligations, and a postcode lottery has emerged. Recent research from the Disabled Children’s Partnership has found that there is a £434 million funding gap in children’s social care. This has concerned the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Autism, which is holding an inquiry into the Act’s implementation, ahead of the Government’s strategy review. The all-party group will report this autumn, but in evidence sessions it has held so far it has discovered some issues of concern.

The inquiry has so far discovered a lack of aspiration for young autistic people, who are not being supported to think about and achieve their goals. I and others across this House have seen so many cases where, with the right support, people with autism can gain a quality of life that could never have been imagined in the past. The inquiry has shown a lack of the right services in local areas, meaning that young autistic people who have had their needs identified cannot then get the support for themselves. Will the Minister therefore commit to ensuring that the new national autism strategy tackles the gap in services for young people on the autistic spectrum?

Another area of concern is the funding for special educational needs and disability—SEND—support. Parents across England are making the case that the Government are failing to allocate enough money to local authorities to enable them to fulfil their legal obligations to children with SEND, especially those on the autistic spectrum. Again, will the Minister comment on whether the Government believe that the funding that councils and schools receive to support children and young people with SEND is sufficient? More than that, if it is not, will he make a case to the Treasury for more money?

The National Autistic Society is a member of the Care & Support Alliance—an alliance of 80 organisations campaigning together on adult social care. The alliance has major concerns about the chronic underfunding of social care. More and more people need social care, but fewer people seem to be receiving it. If you are on the autistic spectrum, this means not getting the help you need to live independently. It means not getting help to find work—85% of people on the autistic spectrum never work. It means that if you are an autistic person in these circumstances you face a lonely life of social and workless isolation. In the short term, it is crucial that the Government address the £3.5 billion gap it is estimated there will be in social care by 2025, but we also need the Government to provide a long-term funding solution that shares the cost of social care fairly across society and delivers an improved system. I hope that that will be done through the forthcoming Green Paper, which was meant to be published in 2017, I think. Can the Minister update the House on when the Government will bring forward the Green Paper?

I do not doubt that the Minister and the Government want only the best for our children and young people, but the best comes at a price and the issues that have been raised in this debate need to be addressed and, above all, properly funded. There is no shortcut—there is no cheap way of ensuring the best quality of life for our young people in Britain. We have to provide the money as well as the words.

I thank the organisations that have given us briefings, including Action for Children, which is the organisation I mentioned. I have had a lifelong relationship with it. I am currently an ambassador—I think that is what it calls it. I also pay tribute to the Children’s Commissioner. The way she has given us data and brought it together is really important, because it had not been done before. She has now brought together all the 90-odd different datasets across government—more than central government. It is very powerful information. I really recommend that those who did not see her report last week have a look at it.

Other people, including my noble friend Lady Massey, have given some of the figures, so I will not repeat them, but they are really stark. As Action for Children says in its recent report Choose Childhood, published only last week, for hundreds of thousands of children in the UK, childhood hurts because they are not getting proper support and intervention. Action for Children asks the Government to develop a cross-government national childhood strategy, led by the Prime Minister, to address the scale and nature of the challenges that children face. It also asks that spending decisions start to prioritise children and childhood, including closing the £3.35 billion funding gap identified in local government and by the Children’s Commissioner, but also to rebalance public policy to promote early help for families, supporting children and parents by intervening before problems reach crisis point.

That brings me to the first real point I want the Minister to think about. Cutbacks in spending have meant that instead of trying to intervene early and prevent problems arising later, money has gone to late intervention when there is an emergency or crisis. This is tragic. We do not know yet exactly what the longer-term effect of this will be, but we have a fair idea from some of the problems we see around: rising youth crime, rising mental ill-health and all those other things that are consequences of late, rather than early, intervention.

Lots of the early intervention programmes I started talking about, such as Sure Start, the Nurse-Family Partnership and other evidence-based programmes, have been undermined. Some have virtually disappeared. Even when the party opposite was first elected in 2010 it was a very enthusiastic expander of things such as the Nurse-Family Partnership. However, it is not good enough that we have resorted to the most expensive form of intervention—when it is a crisis and we have to intervene because otherwise there will be a proper tragedy. The Children’s Commissioner shows in charts how much we have to spend on the most expensive areas where we fail most with children and how much cheaper it is, in some senses, to intervene at an earlier stage and avoid that. Of course, local government has to spend on crisis, but the irony is that the loss of mainstream services, which my noble friend Lady Morris talked about, and the loss of early intervention all lead to us spending more on crisis than we should have to.

Central government will have to set its new priorities in the next few months. I am sure the Minister is looking forward to unravelling some of them. But my second point is that these cutbacks, in mainstream services and early intervention, have not been even across the country. The differential impact is highly significant.

As Members here will know, I have talked for a long time about the north-east but it is true that northern authorities and Midlands authorities, particularly those in urban areas where the highest proportion of people needs support, are also those that have had the highest cutbacks in local government. Just to make sure that I do not keep any interests quiet, I am on the board of the Lloyds Bank Foundation, which has produced a really interesting piece of work, A Quiet Crisis: Local Government Spending on Disadvantage in England. This shows that almost all the reduction in spending—97%—has occurred in the most deprived fifth of local areas. It therefore re-emphasises the tragedy of what we are living through, and the real challenge that government will have to get us out of this mess and begin to give people opportunities.

We are spending on the high end because we have no option; we are also spending less on the children who need it most in areas of high deprivation. This is almost a perfect storm and I am almost sick of standing up here and talking about these sorts of crises. However, there are ways forward. As my noble friend Lady Morris said, we had to take decisions, but we did so by making sure that public spending actually improved opportunities rather than denying them. That is the real challenge to the Government: how will they turn things around so that they open up opportunities, rather than just reacting to the latest crisis?

Until recently, if a family had one member in full-time work, the parents were able to pay the rent, heat the home and put enough food on the table. This is no longer the case. A report was published last month that did not attract much media attention. The Institute for Fiscal Studies published Living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK: 2019, based on research funded by the Rowntree Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council. It focused on,

“those people who are poorest in society”.

One of the three chapters looked at income poverty and concluded that:

“Absolute poverty remained virtually unchanged at 19% in 2017-18”.

But:

“Absolute child poverty rose by 1 percentage point in the latest year as working-age benefits and tax credits were reduced in generosity”.

This is the world in which today’s young people have grown up. In June 2012, the Government issued Statutory Guidance for Local Authorities on Services and Activities to Improve Young People’s Well-being. It says:

“With the right supportive relationships, strong ambitions and good opportunities all young people can realise their potential and be positive and active members of society. Most get these from and through their families and friends, their school or college and their wider community enabling them to do well and to prepare for adult life. All young people benefit from additional opportunities and support, but some young people and their families, particularly the most disadvantaged and vulnerable, need specific additional and early help to address their challenges and realise their potential … It is therefore local authorities’ duty to secure, so far as is reasonably practicable, equality of access for all young people to the positive, preventative and early help they need to improve their well-being. This includes youth work and other services”.

The guidance goes on to list a comprehensive range of activities that should be on offer to young people. Anyone reading this three-page document might imagine that young people have got it made. There is a whole section on involving young people:

“Local authorities must take steps to ascertain the views of young people and to take them into account in making decisions about services and activities for them, in line with Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child”.

The key phrase in the detail of this guidance is,

“so far as is reasonably practicable”.

However, as the excellent briefing by the Library tells us, children’s services are at breaking point. As we have heard from the noble Baronesses, Lady Morris and Lady Armstrong, and from my noble friend Lady Thornhill—who has experience of this on the ground as Mayor of Watford—local authorities have to concentrate on the services they are bound to provide, which do not include youth services and other provision for young people. I am delighted that the statutory guidance says that local authorities “must take steps” to involve young people in making decisions about services. However, as services are being cut year on year, there is scant evidence that local authorities are taking these steps—and what is the point anyway, if there are no services available? For example, what value do young adults see in deciding which of their youth centres should be closed? Things are so bad that I know of one local authority that has had to cut its local youth parliament, and others are likely to do the same. I am sure this decision was not taken lightly but, as well as the loss of young people’s adult voice, it is hardly likely to encourage young adults to vote in future elections.

As we have already heard, the Local Government Association, of which I am a vice-president, has predicted a £3 billion overspend by local authorities on children’s services. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, the statutory duty to ensure the safety of children consumes most of their resources. The local authority cupboard is bare; there will be next to nothing for young adults.

I am not sure whether the withdrawal of the education maintenance allowance is within the scope of this debate, but it is yet another example of public money being withdrawn from those young adults who need it most. This same group of young adults will be members of families for whom the discretionary social fund was a lifeline. In 2013, responsibility for this fund was devolved to local authorities to deliver via the local welfare assistance fund. Given what I have already said, it can be no surprise to noble Lords that there has been a 75% drop in the number receiving any assistance, with one in seven local authorities no longer having such a fund.

So far, I have dwelt, necessarily, on financial poverty. What about financial poverty that inevitably leads to poverty of hope? Barnardo’s report is aptly entitled Overcoming Poverty of Hope. Last month in this Chamber, we had a debate about knife crime. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and my noble friend Lady Thornhill mentioned this, but what do we intend to do about this modern plague in our cities? Putting more police on the streets is one very necessary response, but we are dealing with a situation created in part by the lack of financial support for young people, the loss of the positive activities that used to be available to young adults free of charge and the disappearance of detached youth workers. If you ask a young adult what a detached youth worker is, the most likely answer is a youth with a zero-hours contract. The Barnardo’s report identified the top four authorities for cutting youth services. In every one of them there was a steep rise in knife crime. It is not possible to prove a direct causal link between spending on services for young adults and knife crime, but the correlation seems to indicate the impact of one on the other.

In the dark days of the recession, we were told that we had to cut our financial coat according to our economic cloth. Cuts had to be made to stabilise and protect our economy—although I saw this morning that the pound has reached a new low against the dollar and the euro. The NHS budget was protected and per-pupil school funding was not cut. That was good news. However, the price had to be paid, and it was paid by cutting children and young people’s services to the bone. The children and families affected were, of course, the most vulnerable, including young adults. They suffered a double whammy. In addition to benefits disappearing, including the education maintenance allowance, local authority budgets were cut, as we have heard. The budget of my city of Liverpool was cut by 47%—yes, 47%. Having to manage on virtually half the budget, there was no alternative but to concentrate resources on statutory services.

We are, as we are told, the fifth-largest economy in the world and it should shame us that the Trussell Trust believes that, this summer, it will be doling out even more than the 87,496 summer holiday emergency food parcels handed out in 2018, a figure 20% higher than in 2017. While high-street banks are closing branches every week, the number of food banks continues to increase. The Trussell Trust supports 1,200 food banks across the UK but is still unable to meet the demand. For many children and young adults, the free lunch at school or college is their only main meal, and the summer holidays are not something they look forward to. It beggars belief that, in England, more and more working families are having to rely on free food donated by others. What will Her Majesty’s Government do to restore hope among young adults who feel their future is hopeless? Even in the darkest days, our winter fuel allowances and our bus passes kept coming and, for some noble Lords, free TV licences were renewed. Young people have had a diet of nothing but cuts.

I was interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, mention Gladstone. Of course, we are shortly to have a new Prime Minister. I hope things for young adults will improve under the new kipper—sorry, skipper.

Adding to the negative impact of these cuts is the fact that funding and spending has decreased by a larger proportion in the most deprived areas, so although local authorities have a statutory duty to provide access to educational and recreational leisure-time activities for young people in their area, the Government are denying them the resources to do so in a meaningful or sustainable way. Statutory guidance on this duty emphasises the importance of access to services for all young people, particularly the disadvantaged or vulnerable. Would that this were possible. That guidance was published more than seven years ago, since when the financial constraints on councils have increased considerably. Apparently, a review of the guidance is imminent, and it is certainly overdue.

On children and young people’s issues, the most pressing problem is the rise in youth crime, largely the result of the lack of facilities for young people—as mentioned by my noble friend Lady Massey—allied to severe reductions in the number of police officers on the streets and in communities. This year, a report by the local government services union UNISON revealed that since 2012-13, across England, more than 4,500 youth work jobs had been lost with almost 800 youth centres closed. Just think of the number of opportunities to engage young people lost as a result. These teenagers are left with little to divert them in terms of creative or sporting activities and, all too often, that excess energy finds an outlet in criminal activity. That is not in any way to suggest that closed facilities are a justification for turning to crime, but they might at least point to part of the reason why it can happen.

As referred to again by my noble friend Lady Massey, a report published by the Children’s Society this month found that only 50 of 141 local authorities had a strategy in place to tackle child criminal exploitation. One of the society’s key recommendations for improving the response of statutory services to children being criminally exploited is for the Government to address the shortfall in children’s social care funding and allocate sufficient funding to allow the reinstatement of early help and early intervention services across local authorities.

It is instructive that around 85% of young people’s waking hours are spent outside formal education, yet it has been estimated that local authorities spend 55 times more on formal education than on providing services for young people outwith the school day. This is not the debate to highlight budget cuts to school funding, or the fact that 16 to 19 education has been hardest hit by cuts since 2010, but they both play into the pressures on children and young people being considered today. Youth work can play an invaluable role in supporting young people as they make the transition from childhood to adulthood, but the Government surely need to be more aware than they appear to be of the impact of reducing funding for youth work. They must provide local authorities with the resources for greater investment in youth work, recognising that it plays a key role in promoting a multiagency response to tackling serious violence by providing diversionary activities and mentoring support.

Youth work can be most effective in helping young people who are from particularly disadvantaged backgrounds and do not have the same family or other structures to support them, because this can make it an essential element in tackling the problem of serious youth violence. In its recent report, to which noble Lords have referred, Barnardo’s found, having spoken to young people across the country, that reduced opportunities for them just to hang out contribute to rising crime and anti-social behaviour. What a sad indictment of the Government that is. They give local government the statutory responsibility for providing youth services but do not give them sufficient resources to enable them to do so. That desperately needs to change.

Local authorities also run youth offending teams, as other noble Lords have mentioned, working with young adults in trouble with the law and providing additional services including running local crime prevention programmes. A Written Answer given last month by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice, Edward Argar, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, revealed that there had been a reduction of almost 50% in funding for youth justice grants between 2010 and 2017. Because these grants are used to fund local authorities’ youth offending teams, such a cut is a terrible indictment of the Government’s claim to have a commitment to young people. I could barely believe that, when asked to justify the cuts, a Ministry of Justice spokesperson could do no better than to utter that they were made in the context of wider savings across the department. That is no justification at all. I invite the Minister to say what plans the Government have to restore funding for youth justice grants.

School exclusions play a significant part in young people offending. The recent Timpson review was a step in the right direction, emphasising the need for early interventions by schools to act on disruptive behaviour. It is welcome that, in future, schools will be forced to be accountable for the exam results of pupils they exclude, often through the nefarious practice of so-called off-rolling. The relationship between exclusion and the likelihood of a child being a victim or perpetrator of crime is not seriously in doubt. In March, the Education Select Committee heard evidence that excluded children are more likely to be involved in knife crime, a recent study of 4,000 students by the University of Edinburgh having found a clear correlation. Exclusion leads to increased risk, because schools are a relatively safe environment; if a child is excluded then they have more contact with individuals who can lure them into a gang culture.

The Scottish violence reduction unit has been much credited with reducing knife crime in Glasgow, a city I know well from previous political experience. That unit has also had success with campus police officers in schools, the main aim being to engage with young people rather than police them. This has created positive role models and it is encouraging to learn that the Metropolitan Police is now investing in this approach, with an initial 400 officers employed across London. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has come forward with the Young Londoners Fund, referred to by my noble friend Lady Massey. That major initiative plans to support 50,000 young Londoners aged from 10 to 21 through a raft of community projects. Last year, Sadiq Khan and Cat Smith MP, the shadow Minister for Voter Engagement and Youth Affairs, announced Labour’s plans for a statutory youth service. To deliver on this ambition, the next Labour Government will mandate a national body with dedicated, ring-fenced funding to oversee youth service provision across England. This body will work with local youth partnerships in every area to support service delivery across the country. I also commend the work of the London-based charity Khulisa, which offers a behaviour change programme designed for pupils in schools and pupil referral units. It is specifically designed for young people at risk of offending, exploitation and exclusion. The programme works on the basis that early intervention breaks the school-to-prison pipeline, exacerbated by exclusion, enabling young people to choose a safe and crime-free future.

I turn finally to a subject not mentioned thus far in today’s debate, that of young parents. Action for Children recently published an excellent, though concerning, report entitled The Next Chapter: Young People and Parenthood. From it we learn that there are nearly 450,000 parents in England aged 25 and under. With the growing expectation that parenthood comes later in life, young parents can come up against both negative attitudes and government policy that does not take account of their needs. The focus over the past 20 years has been on reducing teenage pregnancy and improving support specifically for teenage mothers, young fathers and their children. This new research shows that the poor outcomes and challenges faced by some teenage parents are also experienced by young people who become parents between the ages of 20 and 25. The report highlights the difficulties faced by young parents, particularly in education and training. The difficulties they face in gaining qualifications then naturally impact on their experiences of work and, consequently, their finances. Young parents are less likely to be employed than their peers, and only one-third are in skilled work compared with 53% of young people overall. The report found that nearly half of single young parents live in workless households compared with 18% of young people who are not parents.

To break down the barriers that prevent young parents accessing education, employment and other services, much needs to be done by government, but there is a legacy there. Young mothers value the opportunity to attend young parent support groups. These often operate out of children’s centres, offering the chance to meet other young parents and to engage with support workers who can provide advice and signpost other services. Almost every noble Lord who has contributed to this debate has mentioned Sure Start, but it has to be repeated that more than 1,000 of the 3,000-plus Sure Start centres created by Labour in government have closed since 2010. Young parents have been among the hardest hit in terms of the denial of previously available vital support services.

It is important that Care to Learn is extended to all young parents to enable them to maximise their chances of getting an education that enables them to work while raising their family. I look forward to hearing what the noble Viscount the Minister has to say about the recommendations of that Action for Children report. I do not expect him to do so today but I would be obliged if he would write to me about that, because there are several meaty recommendations in it.

In conclusion, I know that the Minister is about to say to noble Lords that, although he would be delighted to tell us what resources and support the Government intend to provide for children and young people’s services, it must await the spending review. Therefore, I will phrase my question to him in a different way. What arguments has he made, or will he make, to Treasury Ministers to secure funding to replace at least some of the cuts to young people’s services? Of course, it may be that by this time next week he will no longer be the Minister. On a personal level, I hope that he is, but can he please set out for noble Lords what he regards as the priorities for the funding of public services that impact on the life chances of young adults? They and their families deserve no less.