Young Futures Hubs

Question

11:27:00

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the potential of Young Futures Hubs to improve crime prevention; and what steps they are taking to ensure that access is not stigmatising for young people seeking support for mental health.

My Lords, through improving support and intervening early, Young Futures hubs will help create opportunity for all and keep our streets safe. They will bring together vital local services in the community, ranging from well-being and mental health support to careers advice, on an open access and referral basis. Backed by £2 million, eight early adopter hubs will launch this year, with local codesign involving young people. This will inform the future rollout of an expected 50 hubs.

I thank the noble Baroness. I have been a firm supporter of early support hubs since their inception. I was delighted to visit the Hive hub in Camden on Monday and greatly impressed by what I saw. But the recent government announcement framed Young Futures hubs very much as a crime prevention initiative, despite the commitments in the manifesto and the NHS 10-year plan that these hubs will provide open access drop-in mental health support for children and young people. Does the Minister agree with me, and with some of those I have spoken to in the sector, that framing these services as crime prevention risks stigmatising some young people and could deter them from accessing support before they even walk through the door?

I think the noble Baroness would agree that there are many common risk and protective factors that can underlay a range of poor outcomes for young people, including mental health challenges and the potential to go off the rails and into crime. That does not mean there is a causal link between mental ill-health and crime. What we are clear about, with respect to the Young Futures hubs, is that whatever their needs, it is essential that children and young people can access support via the hubs without fear of stigma. They need to be welcoming places where all young people want to go for a positive experience. That is why one of the key principles of the hubs is that they will be open access as well as targeted. In doing that, they will provide a safe space to offer more specialist interventions for those who need it, including evidence-based support for children and young people with mental health needs.

My Lords, Young Futures has such potential to deliver transformative change for young people, and I am grateful for the support that has been expressed for it. I have to declare an interest; it was an approach that a commission that I chaired put forward in 2022, dubbed “Sure Start for teenagers” at the time—and just as with Sure Start, this is about bringing together services in a community, as my noble friend has said, to really look at the needs across the whole area of the child. We know that so many young people who suffer from exploitation and the risk of getting involved in crime are also those in poverty, struggling in school or in need of mental health support. Just as Sure Start demanded that departments worked together and that different teams and services in an area worked together, Young Futures demands that too. Will my noble friend say something about the work that is going on with other departments to ensure that all those aspects come to fruition?

My noble friend deserves very great credit for the work that she has done in leading the way to the model of Young Futures hubs in the way she described. She is also right, of course, that to bring together the services that need to create and contribute to Young Futures hubs, we need cross-government working. That is why colleagues across government, from the Department for Education through DCMS, the Department of Health and Social Care, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, are all involved in thinking about the development of the Young Futures hubs and the Young Futures prevention partnerships as well.

My Lords, in my over 30 years of youth and community work, I have watched Governments of varying stripes bring in similar initiatives. Would it not be better to spend this money on organisations that already exist, such as FE colleges, schools and nurseries? You would get a bigger bang for your buck, and they already have the relationships with the young people. Surely that is a better way than starting something new that will take years to get off the ground and be effective. Of course, you could spend that money to ease the cost of parenting—those are environments where there is much more impact on children’s outcomes in future.

The noble Lord is right that all the places that he talked about will have a role to play in supporting young people with mental health issues, who have had very difficult starts in their lives, helping to keep them out of crime. I hope I can reassure the noble Lord that the point about Young Futures hubs is that they will build on the success of existing infrastructure and provision. This will not be a completely new building or completely new provision, but it will be a new approach to making sure that all the services that I have talked about in previous answers can be brought together successfully to support young people. That is what the early adopters in the eight hubs will look to ensure is as successful as possible.

My Lords, it is important that the Young Futures hubs are developed in such a way that they respond to the distinct challenges in different local contexts. How do the Government intend to work with and consult young people from different regions of the UK to help shape and develop these important services?

The right reverend Prelate is right, of course, that there will be different ways in which provision already exists and needs manifest themselves in different parts of the country. That is precisely why, in the development of not only the first early adopter hubs but the 50 hubs to be developed after that, there will be engagement with young people and a recognition of the particular needs and strengths of the various areas in which they are being set up.

My Lords, does the Minister not agree that one of the main drivers of mental problems among young people, and indeed older ones, is financial instability? That arises from a lack of financial education, and not only in primary and secondary schools. There is a figure from only a few years ago that over 60% of university graduates feel that they do not have the education to manage their own financial affairs, even simple things such as future pensions and saving. What are the Government doing to improve that education though the schooling system?

I hope the noble Viscount will look back at the responses that I gave, in considerably more detail than I will be able to do today, on a Question precisely about financial education about six weeks ago. The important point is that there are opportunities in the school curriculum already—in maths, citizenship and other areas—to develop financial literacy. It is of course also important that we find other ways and support them, and the answers that I gave previously outlined some of the partnerships we have and some of the ways we will use other resource to improve financial education for young people.

My Lords, can the Minister say a word about the role of the voluntary sector in these hubs? Often those are the organisations most trusted by young people. I take this opportunity to wish her a very well-earned break over recess.

The noble Baroness is absolutely right. In thinking about the partnerships and the existing provision on which Young Futures hubs will be built, the voluntary sector will have a really important role to play—as she says, quite often reaching the parts that the statutory sector cannot reach. It is precisely those sorts of partnerships that will make Young Futures hubs effective. I take the opportunity to wish her a good break too, because I know we will spend several days together when we return in September.

My Lords, it is a tough old time for young people right now, not helped by the reduction in funding for youth services that we have seen over quite a few years. It is great to see the plethora of innovations coming through for them, but I worry that these hubs seek to be all things to all people, with the idea that they can help with mental issues, knife crime, drug issues, work skills and so on. As these hubs roll out, what assessments are planned to make them as successful and cost effective as possible?

The noble Baroness is definitely right. We have seen a reduction in spending on youth services of 73% since 2011, but that is a reason to be ambitious in the way that the Government are being with the Young Futures hubs. Good-quality youth provision has always been able to tackle all the issues that the noble Baroness identifies—it has just been undercut and reduced very considerably in the past 13 or 14 years. In bringing back those opportunities, with what we have learned about how to tackle mental health, divert young people from crime and provide the range of opportunities that enable young people to succeed in their lives, it is that ambition that the Young Futures hubs will deliver. The eight early adopters will help us to find the models that work well and, as the noble Baroness says, to evaluate them to ensure that we are building on the best practice.