YMCA: ‘Youth sector is on its knees’

New report shows a disparity in spending per head between Wales and England

ISTOCK

YOUNG people are suffering as a result of years of cuts to local-authority youth services in England and Wales, a new report by the YMCA says.

The report, Generation Cut, published this week, shows a disparity in spending per head between Wales and England. A decade ago, the average spend per young person on youth services in Wales was less than half the amount in England; today, that position has reversed: spending per head in Wales is now double, at £91 per head, compared with £45 per child in England.

The report examines local-authority spending on youth services for each financial year since 2010-11, and converted it into real terms to compare with today’s figures. The financial and cost differences are then analysed at national, regional, and local level, to reveal the highest and lowest levels of cuts. The West Midlands recorded the lowest spend, of £27 per head, while Mid-Wales had the highest spend, of £109 per head. Five other areas of England spent less than £50 per head on youth services, including the north-east, north-west, south-east, south-west, and the east of England.

It says that in England there has been a real-term decline of more than 70-per-cent spent per head on youth services over the past ten years. But it also shows more encouraging findings in Wales, where, despite a four-per-cent real-term drop in 2020-21, as lockdowns hindered delivery, funding overall had increased to an annual total of £41.3 million in 2021-22 .

The YMCA, the oldest charitable provider of youth services in England and Wales, says that youth services have been brought to their knees over the past decade. While the report finds that local-authority funding for young people in Wales has increased by 12 per cent over the past year, in England it has risen by just four per cent, it says.

The chief executive of YMCA England and Wales, Denise Hatton, welcomed this increase, but said that it was minute in terms of the amount of funding lost, and should not overshadow the scale of need after a decade of cuts.

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YMCA: ‘Youth sector is on its knees’