I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision about the delivery of youth services by local authorities, including services under section 507B of the Education Act 1996; to require local authorities to specify groups of young people to receive particular services for the purposes of personal and social development of people in those groups; to make provision about the inclusion of youth services in arrangements for the inspection of children’s services and social care services; to make provision about targets for the delivery of youth work and measurement of delivery against those targets; to require local authorities to consult users and prospective users of youth services about the provision of those services; and for connected purposes.
As outlined in the Government’s national youth strategy, every young person deserves a safe place to go, a trusted adult to turn to, and the opportunity to develop skills, confidence and a sense of belonging. For generations, youth services have provided exactly that; they have offered support beyond the school gates, stability when home life is difficult, and early help long before problems escalate to crisis. Today, though, too many young people are growing up without access to those services.
The duty on councils to provide youth services already exists in law. Section 507B of the Education Act 1996 requires local authorities to secure sufficient leisure-time activities for young people. However, the law does not define what “sufficient” means. There are no clear expectations, no common standards, and no effective way to assess whether the duty is being met in practice. This lack of clarity has left youth services vulnerable when councils are forced to balance competing statutory pressures. As a result, funding for youth services has been cut by £1.2 billion since 2010.
Over the same period, the number of council-run youth centres has fallen by more than half. What remains is not only smaller in scale, but increasingly uneven in reach, with spending on youth services ranging from around £1 per young person in some areas to over £130 in others. That inconsistency is the predictable outcome of a statutory framework that is vague, weakly enforced and too easily sidelined.
That matters because youth services do not exist in isolation. When they are absent, pressures do not disappear, but simply resurface elsewhere. In England today, one in five children and young people have a probable mental health disorder. Incidents of youth violence remain at high levels, with 3,000 knife crime offences last year involving children. The Office for National Statistics reports that 16 to 24-year-olds are now the loneliest group in our society. Last year’s “Good Childhood Report” states that the UK’s children and young people are the unhappiest in Europe.
I have seen at first hand the impact that a lack of statutory protection and the defunding of youth services can have on a community. In Croydon, London’s youngest borough, we have lost our council-run youth engagement team. That team of youth workers provided a critical link between the council, the voluntary sector and vulnerable young people across the borough. The lack of statutory protection meant that this vital service was cut without proper consultation with key partners like the local police and the NHS, and without consulting widely with Croydon’s young people. Although Croydon’s voluntary sector is doing all it can to step up and step in where the council has stepped back, without sufficiency benchmarks there is little that our community can do to ensure that Croydon’s youth services are delivered consistently across the borough and in a way that reflects local need.