Mutual delivers benefits for young people at London council
Nina Jacobs
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Mutual is owned by employees and young people.
- Young people involved in decision making through local youth forums
- Youth workers able to provide increased response to needs of local community
ACTION
Youth First threw a lifeline to children and young people in Lewisham when it won a tender to take over the delivery of youth services from the council in 2016.
The community benefit society stepped in at a time of increasing year-on-year budget cuts, which had left an uncertain future for youth services across the borough.
Lewisham was one of a handful of local authorities developing alternative models to provide youth services following other examples in Lambeth, Kensington and Chelsea, Islington and Devon.
These “mutuals” – where staff, and uniquely in the case of Youth First, young people too, operate a social enterprise – were seen as the best chance of delivering stable and effective youth services in local areas.
It took a year of development and scrutiny by Lewisham Council over how the mutual would work in practice before Youth First launched in September 2016.
Employee directors were elected, share certificates were issued to both staff and young people and later that year in November two youth directors were appointed.
Mervyn Kaye, Youth First’s chief executive, says it is still the only mutual in the country delivering youth services that is owned by both young people and staff.
He says 30 per cent of the enterprise’s value is held in trust for the young people that are involved.
“It is a non-dividend paying share but what it means is they get representation on the board,” he explains.
Young people can stand for election to be a youth director and sit on the board alongside employees and community members, he adds.
With 57 staff, working in both full-time and part-time roles, Youth First is responsible for 15 sites across Lewisham.
Of these, 11 are directly run by Youth First with four commissioned by other providers making it also an “umbrella” for other youth work organisations and partners wanting to deliver services in Lewisham, says Kaye.
In addition to running youth centres and adventure playgrounds, Youth First also provides street-based outreach work in the centre of the borough.
Project work involves arts, music, crafts and sport as well offering access to facilities such as climbing walls and recording studios.
Kaye says Youth First aims to involve young people both at individual sites but also strategically through youth forums set up at each site.
“Young people can just get involved in feedback or planning trips, activities or campaigns at their individual site. It works on a localised level so young people feel they have a say in their site,” he says.
Kaye says despite being one of the “last remaining” open-access youth services of its size, Youth First strives to ensure those children and young people that would benefit the most are engaged.
“We make sure they are attracted and come to those sites and those sessions,” he says.
Operating the mutual has brought certain challenges in terms of recruitment and funding but Kaye says ultimately it has meant services have been delivered more cost effectively.
“Not having continual funding can make it hard to recruit but we can raise money externally to the council,” he says.
Had Youth First not taken over when it did, Kaye believes youth services in Lewisham would have followed many other councils in England that have been “at best salami sliced, at worst decimated”.
“Lewisham has been very brave at continuing to invest in youth services because it understands the need for early help,” he says.
From the council’s perspective, handing over responsibility to Youth First has been a positive experience which has resulted in a more “responsive” approach to need, says councillor Chris Barnham, cabinet member for school performance and children’s services.
Barnham says Youth First’s close links with the community meant it could react quickly to serious incidents such as the murder of a young person.
“They are very plugged into community safety and responded very quickly to that by opening up a youth centre out of hours for people to attend,” he says.
The council’s aims to protect youth service provision, ensure it is on a stable footing financially and give it a degree of autonomy have been realised in the three years since Youth First began operating.
“We were able to do this in a way that we weren’t confident we might have been able to if we were facing year-on-year budget cuts,” concludes Barnham.
IMPACT
Youth First provides youth work to more than 6,000 young people each year across its 15 borough-wide sites.
Kaye says the mutual model has delivered increased activity, engaged more children and young people but for 15 per cent less cost than the council-run service previously did.
“We’ve done that with a mix of cost-cutting and income generating,” he says.
Financial savings aside, Kaye believes a greater benefit lies in creating relationships between young people and youth workers so they can deliver early intervention work and offer life skills.
“We are going to need the adults of the future to have [good] confidence and communication skills and you don’t just get that from maths and English lessons. That’s one side of the coin. What we are offering is informal education which is the other side of the coin,” he says.
WHAT IS A PUBLIC SERVICES MUTUAL?
A public service mutual can vary in size and scope, employing a few staff to thousands and bringing in hardly anything to around £100m turnover.
A 2018 research paper commissioned by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on public service mutuals recommends the government to focus on two or three specific areas showing the greatest strength and potential such as social care and children’s services, to encourage more development in the sector.
This was boosted by an extra £1.7m of funding announced in the same year to support the creation of new public service mutuals or the further development of existing ones.
Kensington and Chelsea Council led the way in establishing the first youth services mutual, Epic CIC, in 2014.
This was followed by others set up in Knowsley, Devon, Lambeth, Torbay, Islington and Lewisham.
A 2019 report on public services mutuals by Social Enterprise UK states that there are currently 11 youth sector mutuals in England.
Of the existing youth services mutuals in England, Lewisham is the only one to operate with both employees and young people.
- More from: Public Sector Mutuals State of the Sector, Department for Digital Culture Media and Sport, April 2019