Nick Hurd, who recently took responsibility for youth policy and strategy, has said the youth sector needs to get better at demonstrating its value as it is “too easy” for government to cut youth services.
Speaking at Creative Collisions, a conference for the youth sector led by the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services (NCVYS) and other partners, Hurd said he didn’t understand why it was so easy for government to cut youth services. “Money has flown out of the system in a big way. If you believe it is valuable it should be hard to cut. But it’s too easy.
“How much is your value recognised? And how can the sector get better at measuring and demonstrating its value. I want to work with the sector to prove how good it is.”
Hurd urged the youth sector to help the Cabinet Office understand what was happening on the ground in the youth sector. “We don’t have enough information about what is going on,” he said. “We need your help to know what is going on in your area in terms of youth provision so we can build an evidence base and framework to raise the profile and value of the sector.”
Earlier in his speech, Hurd warned the audience that the country was “getting old very fast”.
“We can’t let politics be dominated by the priorities of old people and it will do if we don’t do anything about it.”
Hurd said to tackle the issue he had created a youth council in his constituency where he had regular discussions with youth people about their concerns. “All the young people who came to talk to me about what mattered to them had completely different priorities from what most people say matters. For example the ‘immigration’ word did not come up once.”
NCS boosts confidence of young
He continued that it was important for politicians and society to create a space to listen to young people. He also said the fact that one million young people were unemployed was a “source of national shame”, saying the country needed to get better at preparing young people for work.
“Employers want academic qualifications,” he said. “But they are looking for something else now. They are more demanding. They are looking for character qualities such as teamwork, self control, the ability to deal with setbacks.”
Hurd said the National Citizen Service (NCS) scheme had showed him that these skills could be developed. “Eight out of ten participants say they got confidence from NCS,” he said.
He said that in a few weeks time something “pretty extraordinary” would be announced around getting more young people involved in social action. “The three party leaders have signed up in support of the campaign,” he said.
Elsewhere, the Creative Collisions conference saw the launch of the first Youth Report. The report, complied by NCYVS, will aim to gather data on the youth sector every year.
The report this year estimated that local authority expenditure on youth services had dropped from £1bn in 2010/11 to £636m in 2013/14; and it found that there are only 30 charity trustees under 18 in the UK.
The Creative Collisions conference was a joint venture between Leap Confronting Conflict, London Youth, NCVYS, NUS, NYA, The Foyer Federation, UK Youth and vInspired.
Extra reporting by Jayna Patel, student and journalist for Expression Cald, a group of Calderdale young people tweeting and reporting national and local news/events for Calderdale young people.
