We can absolutely afford to invest in our young people

Two chancellors have come and gone since George Osborne set out the last full multi-year review six years ago, and rumour has it the third may be on shaky ground as well.

The pandemic downgraded what was meant to be a proper multi-year spending review last year to just a one-year review, which to most people sounds pretty much like a standard autumn statement. This one will be Boris Johnson’s first proper review. It comes in an era where worries about debt and deficits seem to have melted away, and only partly as a consequence of covid.

As many parents will attest, youth clubs and similar services for young people have really felt the brunt of a decade of spending cuts. It’s all the more dispiriting given how important people think youth services are for their local area. When we polled people for our latest Levelling Up research, “improved youth clubs or activities for young people” were among the highest rated things people would expect of an area that had “levelled up”. “Something for the kids around here to do” is the usual way people think about it. No doubt in many cases to keep them out of mischief. And yet youth services have been starved of funding, with an overall fall of 70 per cent since the Conservatives took office in 2010 according to the YMCA.

But perhaps times have changed? Boris is not Dave and Sunak is certainly not Osborne. With the government needing something to show for their borrowed votes, could rebuilding youth services be one way to level up?

One of the problems is that it’s actually really difficult to prove that youth provision really works. Right now, the Treasury is being bombarded with bright ideas for things to spend taxpayers’ money on. The easiest way to fend them off is to assert that the evidence is lacking. I know they do this – I was once one of those Treasury people who liked to use those arguments.

Tracking the impact of youthwork is indeed difficult. Some even worry that badly run youth clubs can actually increase anti-social behaviour, as they provide a good meeting and recruitment place for gangs and so on. So, when it comes to funding decisions, youth services are too often at the bottom of the pile. The government escapes bad press by not wielding the axe directly. Instead, culpability is hidden behind broader cuts to local government, who directly fund youth services and are left with no choice but to scale back.

But now we do have evidence that high quality youth services really do make a difference to young people’s life chances, and some pretty good indications of value for money too. This evidence comes from an evaluation we were commissioned to do by the government and The National Lottery Community Fund, alongside our partners the Centre for Youth Impact, of the £40 million Youth Investment Fund, which ran from April 2017 to May 2021.

It’s not easy to collect impact data from youth charities and community groups. The young people come and go, so it can be tricky to collect data from them, and the overstretched staff and volunteers find it tough to manage too. It is also conceptually hard. How do you know for example what would have happened to these kids without the provision? But the results from our work are very encouraging regardless.

Our evaluation found that high quality youth provision led to greater social and emotional skills, social connectedness, and wellbeing. We all know how crucial these skills are to forging a successful path in life. We think they are even more important now in light of the sacrifices young people have made throughout the pandemic, and the damage caused to their education and development by lockdowns. Our young people deserve to be rewarded for putting their lives on hold.

It also appears to make good economic sense. Making some assumptions, we developed and tested an economic simulation model to predict the long-term economic benefits of open access youth work in England, based on short-term increases in the social and emotional development of young people. We found that for every pound spent, the Treasury is likely to get back between £3 and £13, as the young people are likely to earn more and turn to public services less over their lifetime. Our evaluation also found that youth services play an important role in supporting families and the wider community. The young people themselves are of course the main beneficiaries.

So, in this Spending Review, if substantially more money is not allocated to youth services there can only be one conclusion – Boris does not take the plight of many of our young people very seriously. And I really can't believe that.

Dan Corry is chief executive of the charity think tank and consultancy NPC (New Philanthropy Capital). He was head of the Number 10 policy unit and senior adviser to the Prime Minister on the economy from 2007 to 2010