A London youth worker warns that cuts to services will further disenfranchise an alienated generation.
“I’m a community project day manager, based at a youth centre in inner London. We’re open to all children between five and 17, and provide them with a safe place and links into study or training. We work closely with other agencies, accepting referrals from social services and referring children on ourselves when we suspect they need specialist help.
Slowly, though, the focus on referrals has grown, while we’ve become less able to provide services for the wider community. When I came into this field nearly 20 years ago, the job was about helping young people; now it’s all about ticking boxes so we can get access to money. The ethos of caring about the kids only exists now at ground level, and we’re able to do less and less face-to-face work. The council is only interested in our identifying and referring children who are at risk, or helping them bid for dedicated pots of money for this or that activity.
This change has affected our relationships with partners, too, as everyone has to be able to show how they’re earning their keep. So we try to work with local charities, but we also end up competing with them for funds for working with individuals. And while social workers want to be helpful, there’s an attitude of: ‘I’ll work with you, but it’s my case now!’ They’ve got their own problems though: a lot of good social workers get burnt out, due to overwork and the feeling that they’re working with one hand tied behind their backs.
Other partners have included agencies like the careers advice service Connexions, but in our area they’ve more or less disappeared now. And it’s a bad time to lose that kind of service: lots of school-leavers are finding that there’s only voluntary work placements available. One bright lad, with good results, told me the other day that only three of his peers have found work – and those jobs were all in retail work at the new Stratford shopping centre.
The schools have improved a lot in our area, and many of them are much more outward-looking now too, ready to work with other agencies. But once people have left school many of the training courses available are very short, and lots of young people – of all races and from all kinds of backgrounds – have been scared away from university by the rise in tuition fees. That hike in fees created a lot of anger; in fact, maybe that was the first spark for the resentment that ended in the riots.
I’m not going to defend looting, but there’s a real feeling of anger among these young people, and a feeling that they don’t belong; that they can’t afford university and there’s no good jobs for them. I have to say that the police don’t help the situation sometimes. People understand that someone who shoots at the police may get shot, and in that situation I can sit down with young people and talk about the risks of carrying a gun; but if that’s the initial story and then it becomes clear that the police weren’t being straight with people, my arguments are blown away. Sometimes the police act reasonably, but if they’re not clear about the sequence of events quickly then that creates suspicion and more anger.
At times like this, our work is particularly important: we give young people somewhere to hang out, and we can keep them engaged with wider society. But our hours are falling dramatically: council funding for our services has been cut by two thirds, and soon we’ll only be open occasionally. Councillors don’t like to close centres, because that generates headlines; but they cut opening hours until the children stop coming to a centre, then they quietly close it – and six months later, it’s a Tesco!
The council is asking for volunteers to try and keep some of these centres running, but councillors won’t give any commitments about use of buildings, support services or funding; they’re trying to dump services on people, rather than involving volunteers in a service. So we’re ending up with fewer youth centres with shorter hours, focusing on a smaller section of the community – and at a time when young people across the community are worried about their futures.
Some of the government’s ideas sound good: they talk about reducing ring-fencing, cutting targets and paperwork, and giving frontline workers more control over how we work. But we haven’t seen any of that so far. What we’ve seen is cuts and more cuts.
We all understand that there’s a worldwide recession, so maybe we need to do things in a different way. But let’s find a new model first and then make the cuts around that, rather than demolishing all these services and then wondering what we do next. I hear the rhetoric about trusting the frontline, and it sounds good. Right now, though, we just need enough money to maintain basic services for young people in our community.”