Risk-averse charities miss out on youth work contracts, says Labour councillor

25 Sep 2017 News

A Labour councillor has said that larger organisations are getting more of councils’ youth work contracts because they are able to take greater risk than charities, while charities said that 'ridiculous' impact reporting requirements were a problem.

At a fringe event at the Labour party conference, organised by the Local Government Association, delegates discussed the current social investment funding environment for organisations providing youth services.

Labour councillor Amy Cross said a problem with the current model was that organisations with greater expertise in youth work such as local charities were put off applying for contracts because they lacked to capacity to measure their impact.

She said: “You end up with massive organisations that come in to an area that they don’t really know that employ workers that don’t know the area, don’t know the types of problems that young people are facing and actually, it just doesn’t work and it breaks down.”

Cross said local authorities were unable to provide any other type of investment, such as grants, for youth services while their budgets are so restricted.

'Difficult to demonstrate impact'

Lee Middleton, managing director of the National Youth Agency, said in his previous role as a local government commissioner the charities he worked with had found it difficult to demonstrating impact .

Middleton said that even when a desired impact had been achieved, it was hard to demonstrate that it was the contracted organisation’s work specifically that achieved that.

He said: “I think there needs to be a national conversation around the complexity around that, because it puts people off.

“The risk level is deemed so high that people won’t touch it. It is bringing that risk threshold down or accepting a high threshold.”

Burden is 'ridiculous'

Meanwhile, Labour’s shadow cabinet was called on to propose scrapping social investment funding models for youth work charities.

At the same event, chief executive of sports charity StreetGames Jane Ashworth described the impact measurement responsibility on charities as “ridiculous”.

She said: “74 per cent of our participants say the primary thing that keeps them there is the relationship with the team leader. And you can’t put that into a neoliberal funding model.

“We need a serious conversation about how an incoming Labour Government will get us out of this mess and put a stop to it. It is nonsense and it is cruelty to the organisations and the participants.”

Former Bolton West MP Julie Hilling echoed Ashworth’s comments, and said requiring an organisation providing youth services to achieve specific outcomes threatened the autonomy of the young people they were supporting.

Shadow treasury minister Annelise Dodds said there was a balance to be struck between different funding streams for charities.

She said: “It’s about not having false expectations. But also not diminishing the case for local authority and central government provided funding that still remains. So there remains a balance I think.”

More on