Cat Smith: Only Labour can tackle the crisis in Britain’s youth services

Happy Youth Work Week. This is an opportunity for us all to celebrate the achievements of youth work across the country.

Hundreds of events are taking place at youth work organisations across England, from youth voice events to celebrating youth work. British Youth Council and UK Youth are running national campaigns on youth services. I will also be hosting a parliamentary reception with Choose Youth in support of rebuilding the youth service.

This week is important because youth workers are the unsung heroes of our communities and their achievements must be recognised and celebrated. Youth workers support young people in disadvantaged areas to develop self-confidence and build a positive future for themselves. They help young people gain qualifications through non-traditional pathways. Youth workers also provide young people with safe spaces to socialise and develop community cohesion.

The British Youth Service was once the best in the world. It was a unique public service built by young people, the main youth workers unions, and local authorities. It provided open access support, guidance, and informal education to young people for generations. Every local authority had a youth service staffed by qualified full time workers, part timers and volunteers. Local authorities also worked in partnership with voluntary providers. As a result, it was emulated in many places internationally.

In 2010, the last Youth Service expenditure figures stood at £350m in England per annum. The Audit Commission demonstrated several times that for every £1 spent on the Youth Service, £8 was generated to the economy in other benefits, such as reducing crime rates, attracting volunteering, or improving educational attainment.

However, this Conservative government failed to recognise these benefits. Instead they have imposed ideological driven cuts on local authorities, consciously destroying the whole post war infrastructure of the Youth Service.

New analysis by the Commons library commissioned by Labour shows that under current budget plans £422m will have been cut from spending on youth services between 2011/12 and 2017/18. Under the Conservatives, over 600 youth centres have closed, over 3,500 youth work jobs have gone and 140,000 places for young people have been cut.

The scale of the attack on the service is so great that it has in effect disappeared. For example, one of the best youth services in Coventry was forced to close completely in July, which followed seven years of complete service closures.

These cuts are having a devastating impact, particularly for the most vulnerable young people in our society. Open access provision has almost disappeared as poorly resourced councils focus on targeted youth work.

Youth work as a profession is also under attack by this government. Service redesign, marketisation, deskilling and attempts to abolish the youth worker professional standards – this is the legacy of youth services under the Conservative government.

The government’s approach is completely flawed – instead they are only shifting the burden onto other public services. Increases in mental health, substance abuse and anti-social behaviour will only increase pressures on statutory services.

I applaud youth workers across Britain who have fought to save what they can. There are still examples of good youth work in localised areas and voluntary organisations exist in fragments. However, we cannot rely on youth workers to save the profession.

The general election served as a wake-up call to the Conservative Party, who have ignored young people for years. Two million young people registered to vote and we witnessed the highest youth since 1992.

In September, Philip Hammond vowed to help young people in his Autumn Budget after the Tories failed to recognise the importance of speaking to young voters. However, as we have seen before, encouraging words are not always followed by appropriate action.

Only a Labour government will address the crisis youth services face to build a Britain for the many not the few. We will reverse the cuts and carry out a root and branch review to explore innovation and service delivery, with young people at the heart of this review.

I encourage everyone to get involved with Youth Work Week both locally and nationally to demonstrate our party’s continued support for young people. For more information please visit the website.

Youth Work week runs from today until Sunday.

Cat Smith is shadow minister for voter engagement and youth affairs and MP for Lancaster and Fleetwood.