Youth services should be equitable, not sufficient

 A couple of weeks ago, I received a request from the National Youth Agency to complete a questionnaire for its Sufficiency Commission (a grand name if ever there was one). And a few weeks ago, the Department for Education launched its consultation on what is understood by sufficiency, as enshrined in the Education and Inspections Act 2006, for the provision of positive activities for young people. In due course, no doubt, positions will be taken, assertions made and interpretations offered – and then much will roll on as usual.

That was precisely the reason, almost exactly 20 years ago, for the dismissal and demise, in the youth work sector, of the notion of "adequacy". Warwickshire County Council had cut its youth service to the bone, a decision that was subjected to a failed challenge in the High Court by the youth work union CYWU, when Lord Justice Pill famously said that if one pound was considered to be adequate by the local authority in question, then it was. With the national organiser of the union, I was one of a group of people who then took up the cause of converting the case to "sufficiency" – a platform, not a ceiling. Surely there had to be a minimum threshold, and it was not one pound!