Services for Young People

Debate between Graham Stuart and Karen Buck

Thursday 22nd March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Stuart]

I agree with the Minister; that is exciting and interesting. My note of caution is that there must be many positive services, including youth services, which would struggle to collect the evidence, dissociated from all the other impacts and influences on young people’s lives, to prove that they were delivering. Perhaps that is why, in many cases, we might want to have the payment by results managed and triggered at a higher level, with those people making a discretionary decision. When they see great work—when they see it they can recognise it—they will realise that it is offering value for money. They could take things that did not have an individual evidence base, yet would none the less continue to be commissioned. A dangerous and perhaps self-interested parallel with my previous life as a publisher is an advertiser who places an advert for £1,000 and immediately receives £2,000 back in directly attributable profit on sales. He may spend the rest of his career thinking that advertising is just about getting money back immediately without any other elements to it, which would be a mistake. Life is more complicated than that, and the danger of finding such things as the work in Peterborough, or, possibly, the initiatives mentioned by the Minister, is that we are looking for everything to be able to justify itself on a payments by results basis. Perhaps councils, or other bodies at a higher level, should commission without having to expect that from each initiative in their portfolio.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

While we are on this interesting issue, may I encourage the hon. Gentleman in his caution? Although the Minister made a good point about how one can hold an institution to account for services for which it is responsible, is it not the case that, for the youth service, good youth work in deprived communities is good at—we need it to be good at—helping reduce offending behaviour? Of course, offending behaviour and its impact has nothing to do with the youth service, but it will be measured by the police or the youth offending team in the local authority. Often, the youth service will be targeting those most at risk of offending behaviour anyway. Is it not the case, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says, that this is very complex? It would be quite dangerous to encourage an organisation like an individual youth club to be held too much to account for an issue such as offending behaviour.

[Mr Stuart]

I think I agree with the hon. Lady. One of the criticisms we have made of the sector is the need, collectively, to make a better case. When Ministers—we have one with us today, and the hon. Lady was one previously—go to the people in the Treasury, they need a strong case, especially when it is, “Give me money today and I will give you savings tomorrow.” There is a certain natural and understandable scepticism in the Treasury, and a strong evidence base is needed from which to make the point.

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[Mr Stuart]

I was reflecting on those words even as I read them, but their implications are clear. If there is no firm action plan, the criticism—to spell it out for my hon. Friend in case he, too, is missing the blindingly obvious—is that if the strategy produced by the Government after such a long period of preparation does not spell out exactly what they are going to do and how they will hold to account those responsible for delivering services, there is every danger that we will have fine words and no real delivery. That might be a statement of the obvious, but there is a serious risk, with a strategy that is light on content, in respect of whether there is confidence that it will deliver on the ground.

Positive for Youth has the right focus on fostering young people’s aspirations and on their personal and social development. It is good to hear the Government praise the potential of young people and extol the qualities and achievements of the vast majority, especially in light of the negativity towards young people generated by last summer’s riots. The Government and the Minister are right to emphasise the positive. If all we ever measure are provisions averting negative behaviour by young people, we suggest that their natural tendency is to behave negatively. In fact, the Minister wants to emphasise—the Government are right about this—that most young people are positive members of our society and that we should support and celebrate their positive behaviour.

[Ms Buck]

Mr Robertson, I wonder whether it is appropriate—I know it is not normally done—to welcome the young people who are listening to the debate, because it is to be appreciated. The message that the hon. Gentleman has just given about the majority of young people being positive and aspirational for themselves will be heard in this Chamber as well as outside it.

[Mr Stuart]

Yes. Having served as a Minister, the hon. Lady will know that we can be as positive as we like for as long as we like in as many speeches as we like, but as soon as we say something negative, that will appear in the newspaper. That is the nature of being in power and the nature of news.

It is right to call the paper “Positive for Youth” and immediately emphasise the positive and recognise that we regard young people not as a problem, but as an immense, positive force for good in our society. That is important and we cannot say it too often, although it will never appear in any form of press thereafter. But we have to live with that.

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[Mr Stuart]

The Committee will look forward to pursuing that further with the Minister, but if it is a correction I am grateful for it.

The purpose of our inquiry was to recognise that so many youth services struggle to show their impact—we criticised them for that and also sympathised with them because of the impossibility of doing so—but we know anecdotally from young people that those services are important. We wanted to provide a platform for youth services to be heard to ensure that time was found to focus on them. We hoped that the process of conducting the inquiry would make it less likely that ill-thought-out and disproportionate cuts would be made by local authorities in a tough situation—caused by the profligate behaviour of the previous Government, to reinforce the Minister’s point and to make a tiny rebuttal of so many partisan remarks from Opposition Members.

Despite the Minister’s occasional tetchiness at our probing—

[Ms Buck]

Occasional?

[Mr Stuart]

I say “occasional”, but we are working together, and the Minister is committed. One of the best things that the Prime Minister is doing for the governance of this country is keeping Ministers in place for a decent period, at least so far. Notwithstanding the Minister’s tetchiness, I hope that Ministers remain in office for longer periods, because that will lead to better understanding of the issues with which they are wrestling. Select Committees, which probe and challenge, and write reports such as ours, do so because they care about the issues. I hope that any heat, as well as light, that we might generate will strengthen the Minister’s arm. I know that he is personally committed to the matter, and works tremendously hard to look after the interests of our young people.

Sure Start Children’s Centres

Debate between Graham Stuart and Karen Buck

Wednesday 2nd March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Stuart]

It is certainly a time to fiddle with it. There is ample room for improvement, but it would be a shame if these centres were inadvertently dismantled before what they could deliver had been properly thought through. I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman about that.

I also want the Minister to say whether there are any incentives in place for local authorities to ensure that they focus on changing the life chances of young children, because all too often people will pay lip service and say, “Of course we’re on board with this.” I am reminded of another Select Committee trip, this time to the Netherlands in the last Parliament. The Dutch changed the way local authorities were financed in respect of young people’s services. I think they froze the money from central Government so that if there was a spike in youth unemployment and so forth, local authorities would be at serious financial risk, but if they addressed such matters, they would be much better off. As a result, local authorities stopped just processing young people and putting the financial claim for that into the centre. Instead they became locally responsible for the financial consequences of young people remaining as NEETs. I believe—the previous Select Committee Chairman will put me right if I am wrong—that they more than halved the number of NEETs over the years.

If there are incentives for local authorities that are real and that bite and that mean they take this issue incredibly seriously and focus on it, that would give me more confidence than even the maintenance of the centres. If I felt that local authorities were driven by a desire to grasp this agenda and make a difference to their young people’s lives and one of them told me it was closing some of its children’s centres, I would find that more encouraging than watching, in this time of fiscal retrenchment, centres close apparently because they were especially local and apparently because things would then get better.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very powerful case, as always. On local authorities and incentives, I wonder whether he shares my concern that some authorities may do what it looks as though my local authority is doing. Westminster city council is trying to keep the children’s centres open so it can avoid the controversy attached to closing a building, but it is slashing outreach and drop-in services and other services that actually work and that are provided from within the bricks and mortar of those buildings. That is likely to have an even worse impact on children’s outcomes.

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Just before the Chairman of the Select Committee responds to that intervention, I want to make the point that, although there is no time limit on Back-Bench speeches and the House is listening attentively and with respect to the Chairman of the Select Committee, I know that he will want to take account of the substantial interest in making contributions to the debate, and I am keen that everyone who wishes to speak should have the chance to do so. I know that the hon. Gentleman will tactfully take account of my gentle ministration.