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Union leader urges parties to make youth service statutory

Thursday, 14 January 2010 10:33

Tags: unions | young people involvement | youth services

cywu The leader of the Community and Youth Workers' Union (CWYU) has called for political parties to make youth service statutory to protect them from harmful local authority budget cuts.

Doug Nicholls made the plea in response to several councils announcing that they are to slash investment in youth services. Youth centres and projects targeting important issues such as teenage pregnancy and alcohol abuse look set to suffer badly.

Nicholls, CWYU general secretary, said: "Local authorities should get together and insist that all parties in Parliament legislate for a statutory youth service."

He was concerned that youth work is being neglected by being grouped together with other youth services, and is not afforded the same protection as other statutory services, particularly in child protection.

He added: "Youth work has been pooled into bigger youth services budgets, which have been dominated by the social care and case work agendas. Despite youth work being proven to be cost effective in the long term, it still hasn't received a statutory position."

Oxfordshire is one of the areas planning to cut youth work budgets. Councillor Louise Chapman, Oxfordshire's lead member for children and young people, said she was left with very little choice when looking to make savings.

"The problem is that the government ringfences everything with grants," she said. "Out of a directorate of £600m, I was left with £98m to look at and even that included statutory duties we had to carry out." While Chapman stressed the proposals are subject to public consultation she said there is little else that can be pared back.

The government is currently developing a set of standards, set to be published in March, that local authorities can use to ensure young people receive what they are entitled to.

But in an interview with CYP Now, shadow children's minister Tim Loughton believed that youth services could be more efficient if they ceased to be council-run.

He said: "I am putting a question mark over whether youth services departments are the best people to run youth services. I think we need to have local authorities contracting out more to outside organisations, and effectively local authorities taking on a greater commissioning role rather than trying to run these services themselves."

The Proposed Cuts

Oxfordshire: Consulting on proposals to reduce annual funding for youth support from £3.7m to £1.4m by 2013
Birmingham: Youth service budget cut by seven per cent, amounting to £980,000 over the next two years
Isle of Wight: Cutting youth services by up to a third. It currently spends £71 a year per young person but is looking to bring that down to £52
Coventry: £300,000 already cut from children's and family education services, with £360,000 proposed to be taken from the youth service
Nottinghamshire: Plans to cut youth service budgets by £401,000 and Connexions budgets by £315,000

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