British Youth Council: five factors behind demise of youth voice stalwart

The British Youth Council’s (BYC) closure sent shockwaves through the sector, with leaders and young people alike lamenting the demise of a bastion of youth voice.

The organisation’s chair Zhara Khan announced the closure in a statement on 21 March, citing “ongoing financial challenges” as the reason behind BYC’s insolvency.

She said: “Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to provide a sustainable future for the charity. The economic environment has significantly impacted our ability to generate income.”

Khan added that the board’s decision had been “cemented by the recent administration of our dedicated and passionate partners The Body Shop”.

The BYC’s 75-year history, and more than a decade spent running the UK Youth Parliament (UKYP), highlights the magnitude of its loss for young people.

The charity was initially set up by the Foreign Office in 1948 and became an independent charity in 1963.

Its work in spearheading the Votes at 16 campaign and successfully lobbying for the creation of children’s commissioner posts across all four countries of the UK have been praised by the sector.

However, concerns over underfunding of its UKYP contract, the loss of major funding streams, including its £70,000 per year charity partnership with the Body Shop, as well as accusations of poor managerial oversight of finances have all been cited as key factors behind its demise.

1. Financial concerns

Questions over the financial stability of the BYC were raised earlier this year. Its accounts for 2022/23 show that as of 31 March, its reserves stood at £83,333 but that £308,000 was needed “to cover three months (12 weeks) of running costs [for] overheads, staffing costs including redundancy and project closure”.

In January, staff pay was delayed by a week due to “cash flow” issues.

During an all-staff meeting held via Zoom on 13 February, a recording of which has been watched by CYP Now, BYC’s former chief executive Jo Hobbs apologised for the delay, blaming the late payment of around £70,000 worth of invoices.

During the meeting, Hobbs announced she had resigned from her post in December “for health reasons”. This month (April), she was named as the new chief executive of Classics for All – a charity supporting state schools to embed classical subjects into the curriculum.

She explained to staff on the Zoom call that the organisation had been forced to “draw down on the financial reserves” in 2022/23.

“Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to build the reserves this year, our fundraising is behind target. We’ve spent more than we’ve brought in on fundraising,” Hobbs told employees.

The BYC had lost funding from the Blaygrave Trust and the John Hamlyn Foundation in recent months “due to changes in the way these big funders operate since the pandemic”, she added.

Speaking to CYP Now anonymously, staff members have suggested that funders “changed strategy to be more targeted to demographics or geographies, meaning that a universal provision is becoming harder to fund through those routes”.

2. Restructure proposals

Internal documents seen by CYP Now reveal board members and senior leaders had planned a drastic restructure in a last-ditch attempt to keep the organisation afloat.

Proposals, which were revealed to staff during the 13 February Zoom meeting, include stripping an entire layer of senior management from its workforce structure and giving notice on the charity’s rented London office.

A consultation was set to run from 19 February to 6 March with any appeals from employees due to be submitted by 18 March – days before the charity closed with immediate effect.

The closure of the organisation was being treated as a “worst case scenario”, employees were told during the meeting.

Harry Twohig, BYC trustee and chair of its risk committee told staff that a “slimmed down” version of the BYC “run by volunteers” would be preferable to losing it entirely.

Staff members who wish to remain anonymous claim that there were delays in senior management team members accessing the charity’s accounts and that regional youth work units were not provided with the usual levels of funding in February or March due to the financial difficulties.

When asked by staff during the 13 February Zoom meeting if acquisitions or mergers had been explored as solutions to the BYC’s financial position Twohig admitted no discussions had taken place with external stakeholders as “it would mean revealing to partners the state we’re in”.

The charity is yet to share its accounts for 2023/24, however, when asked by employees how long the organisation could run on its reserves just five weeks before its closure, Hobbs admitted “about a week”.

3. DCMS declines bail-out plea

It appears the BYC informed the government about its financial challenges shortly after the 13 February meeting, during which Hobbs said she wanted to ensure employees were aware of restructure plans first.

In a letter to members of the UKYP about the closure, Stuart Andrew, minister for sport, gambling and civil society, says that the DCMS knew the BYC was facing “significant financial difficulty” in February.

He adds that “the scale of these challenges unfortunately meant that the DCMS could not provide emergency funding as this would not meet the key standards of managing public money”.

However, another BYC member of staff argues that if the DCMS had been made aware of the state of the organisation’s finances earlier “it could have been a different story”.

They claim that the DCMS refused a final plea for emergency funding the day before the BYC’s board took the decision to close. Staff were informed the following day, with the news made public just hours later.

4. Inadequate UKYP funding

While staff members who spoke to CYP Now claim poor managerial oversight may have sped up the closure of the BYC, they also point to a cut in UKYP funding from DCMS over the last decade for piling further financial pressure onto the organisation.

In 2021, campaigners argued that the BYC had been “set up to fail” when it won a £233,000 DCMS contract to fund the costs of the UKYP for one year – the amount was 30% less than the funding it received for the same programme in 2014.

The charity was awarded £750,000 to run the UKYP in March 2023, however, this was expected to cover two years’ of running costs and still left the BYC “drawing down on reserves” to pay for the delivery of statutory requirements, one staff member says.

They add that flaws in the contract meant that the BYC could not recoup the full cost of services.

Leaders contacted the government in 2023 to highlight struggles “to secure the additional funding needed to deliver the UK Youth Parliament programme,” according to another former staff member who adds that delivery of the project last year cost in excess of £500,000 compared with £380,000 invested by the DCMS.

Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, vice chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Youth Affairs, says: “There’s a clear pattern that the UKYP cannot run in its current form. It has to be placed on a proper statutory footing, and parliament needs to pay for it because it doesn’t benefit the department (DCMS), it benefits parliament.”

In a statement, the DCMS insists that the government is “absolutely committed to the UK Youth Parliament and to ensuring that it continues to both represent and amplify the voices of young people” (see box).

5. Loss of Erasmus+

Russell-Moyle adds that the loss of youth study and training scheme Erasmus+ for the UK’s young people as a result of Brexit is another key driver leading to the closure of the BYC.

The BYC received around £100,000 per year of Erasmus+ funding from the European Commission to deliver so-called “structured dialogue” programmes to facilitate discussions between young people and decision makers.

“The structured dialogue money automatically went to BYC – that finished when we left Europe and it never got replaced,” the MP for Brighton, Kemptown explains.

Leigh Middleton, chief executive of the National Youth Agency (NYA), describes the loss of Erasmus+ funding as “one of the biggest things to have brought BYC down”.

He argues that the funding should have been replaced by an “international fund” to continue the work of the BYC and UKYP abroad.

While evidence suggests the BYC was no longer financially viable in its established format, questions remain over whether whatever takes its place will be able to make the sums add up without additional support from central government.

What next for the future of youth voice in England?

Leigh Middleton, NYA chief executive, describes the BYC as “the top of an important pyramid of youth voice, youth engagement and decision making that flows down to every local council, youth council, school council and thousands of youth projects across the country”.

“There’s a risk that without it, organisations could do much less of this stuff,” he says.

The DCMS is due to name the new holder of the UKYP contract imminently, but Middleton worries that the sector “just thinks about the UK Youth Parliament” rather than fighting to safeguard the work of the BYC “as a whole”.

Former BYC chief executive and director of Young Voices Heard James Cathcart says the government has a responsibility to “follow up their commitment to the integration of youth voice and influence into public life, to now facilitate a youth-led review that ensures a new national youth council and the representation of youth voice should not be so financially vulnerable going forward”.

“In its relationship with any government going forward, it should be as secure yet independent as the role of the children’s commissioner, a role BYC lobbied for,” he explains.

Middleton adds: “There’s no more important year than a general election year for young people to be around the table.”