Report (5th Day)

Part of Localism Bill – in the House of Lords at 7:00 pm on 10 October 2011.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Baroness Hanham Baroness Hanham The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government 7:00, 10 October 2011

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for introducing that interesting short debate on this matter. I have a lot of sympathy with what she has to say about the importance of engaging young people in what is going on. If she will forgive me saying so, though, her amendments are not necessary, and I will tell her why.

The amendment would ask all local authorities to establish a youth council and prescribe in some detail how that youth council should be engaged with. As my noble friend Lord Tope has said, there are already youth councils and youth parliaments in many local authorities. Indeed, I recall that the former Lord Speaker-maybe the current Lord Speaker will do the same-has welcomed young people into this Chamber for a youth parliament to debate things about democracy. It is understood across Government that it is vital to engage young people in what is going to be their future. I do not think that there will be any disagreement about that.

The Government are already committed to these issues. The Department for Education has recently awarded grant funding of £850,000 to the British Youth Council for 2011-13 to provide support for young people's voice and involvement in decision-making at both local and national level in England. In addition, there is already a statutory duty on local authorities to provide sufficient educational and recreational activities for 13 to 19 year-olds, which includes a duty to take steps to ascertain the views of young persons on services and facilities and to secure that the views of qualifying young persons in the authority's area are taken into account.

The Department for Education will be consulting shortly with a view to producing new strategic guidance on this duty, which will reflect the findings of the recent Ofsted report on the commissioning of youth services, so there is a great commitment not only to the provision of these services but to young people's voice being heard. Those findings include the recommendation that rather than prescribing from the centre which services should be provided and to what level, the Government should look to local authorities to publish their own local offer of services to young people.

It is for that reason that, while I agree with much of what the noble Baroness has said, I am not able or minded to accept the amendment. As other noble Lords have said, it does not fit neatly into this legislation at this rather late stage. We do not want to be prescriptive about how local authorities provide services for young people, nor about how local authorities engage them in decision-making or how they create space for young people to have a collective voice. I reiterate that I know that a great many authorities already do this and value the views that they get.