Update Monday June 11 2012 – there’s a list of cuts to youth services at the end of this post. These are very interesting in light of Eric Pickles’ comments about “troubled” families yesterday and today. Some councils (Norfolk, for example) have cut their ENTIRE youth service budgets. Truancy officers, youth clubs, mobile units which youth workers use to travel round to meet and talk with kids in the places they hang out – they’ve been threatened and cut all over. 

Perhaps needless to day, those sorts of cuts have caused considerable (and under-reported) upset in local communities, where people are extremely concerned (particularly in the wake of last year’s riots) about possible fallout from high youth unemployment and unrest. Neither Pickles’ “initiative” nor Theresa May’s “crimbos” can disguise the fact that millions have been slashed from youth budgets, experienced youth workers’ jobs have been threatened, or cut and the kind of services which may have helped at-risk kids lost. This is quietly going on all around the country.

Thought I’d rush out a little something on cuts to youth services budgets, in the interests of crapping on Theresa May’s ridiculous criminal behaviour orders idea from the height that it deserves.

May is sonorous on punishment, but extremely quiet on the monumental cuts to council youth budgets and services that have excited (much under-reported) protests, petitions and community concern about potential youth problems and violence (particularly after last August’s riots) in recent times. Councils have tended to file those petitions and that concern in the Tough Shit pile, but we’re going to have a quick poke through it all the same.

“There is no doubt that sometimes difficult behaviour, particularly by teenagers, remains an issue of great concern in many neighbourhoods,” Enver Solomon, the Children’s Society policy direction and standing committee for youth justice chair, told the Guardian this morning, “but youth engagement programmes, community mediation and interventions that address the whole family rather than just the child are far more effective than rushing to rely on court orders.”

Enver is right. Unfortunately, we’re fast entering an era where your local council will be funding those services out of petty cash. If you’re lucky.

This post is a short outline some of those cuts to youth services. Am a bit rushed for time today, but will add to the list at the end over the next few days.

Last month, I attended a full and fraught Derbyshire county council meeting where several hundred locals turned up with a petition to save youth services that had been signed by themselves and more than 16,000 others. Local people were and are very concerned about a council proposal to cut youth service budgets by about £800,000 this year and to outsource parts of whatever is left to the voluntary and independent sectors.

People doubted that the same services could be delivered by those sectors, particularly on nearly £1m less. About 157 youth workers are likely to lose their jobs. Threatened services, as you’ll see from the video below, include a mobile service where youth workers travel around the county to talk to youngsters who might be hanging about and getting into trouble. The council confidently asserted that all sorts of voluntary and independent groups would and had come forward to fill the gaps that the cuts would open up. Unfortunately, the council was not prepared to release a list of those organisations.

Anyway – local youth campaigner Greg Roberts had collected more than 16,000 signatures for a petition to save budgets and directly-provided youth services. As you’ll see in the video below, the council spent most of the afternoon fumbling through its constitution looking for the clause that would excuse it from debating and voting on the petition. You’ll also see that this went down none too well with local people. They didn’t seem to think that the council’s plans for youth services boded well for social harmony at all.

In case Theresa May continues to forget to mention them, other notable cuts to youth and young people’s services include:

Norfolk county council: cut its entire youth services budget

Newcastle council: reducing the number of looked after children

Wigan council: reducing the number of looked after children

Salford council: £1.3m cut to youth services budgets

Lambeth council: cuts to youth services could increase violence

North Somerset: entire youth service threatened

An excellent spreadsheet from A Thousand Cuts and Unison on massive cuts last year to youth services through Connexions.

Young people protest as amounts spent on education and youth services drop

Protests as Kent County council cuts youth centres as part of a £1.4m cut to youth services budgets

And so on and so on and so on. People know what services they’re losing and have more than an inkling of the ways those losses might play out – as anyone who reads youth unemployment figures and/or saw last year’s riots would. More than 16,000 people in Derbyshire figured the endgame out for themselves and signed a petition in the hope of changing it. The Met has seen the future, too. They’ll be rearranging the writing on the wall with rubber bullets.