What measures she plans to put in place to enable young people to play a greater role in decisions on the provision of local services.

Involving young people in decision making is essential if we are to ensure that services meet their needs, and local authorities are required to consult young people while developing their children and young people's plan. As my right hon. Friend the Minister for Children and Families has just been saying, the new youth opportunity card, announced in the "Youth Matters" green paper, will develop that involvement further. I urge all hon. Members to encourage their local authorities to involve young people in decision making. I draw attention to the participation works initiative, launched only yesterday, which provides online useful services to help young people involved in participation.

In West Lancashire, there are 118 unemployed 16 to 18-year-olds and just 20 live vacancies. I want the local authority and various organisations and partnerships to be very much involved in planning services that best meet their training, education and employment needs. How can the Minister help me to do that?

As my hon. Friend will know, young people become disengaged for a wide variety of reasons. They often need individual personal support to work out their needs and to gain access to opportunities such as education, training and jobs. My hon. Friend is right to suggest that local partnerships such as children's trusts should provide opportunities for young people to access those services at the best time and in the best place. She might like to consider ways in which young people can be involved in planning such services by taking part in discussion and working groups with youth workers and others to find out what their needs are and how to meet them. In Lancashire, some of those partners are setting up an internet TV project to generate views about such issues so that services can be responsive to their needs.

Is the Minister aware that in the City of Westminster the council recently threw open swimming pools across the borough for young people between the ages of 11 and 18 to use them after school free of charge? Is not that exactly the type of provision that should be available under opportunity cards, and will the Minister commend it to other excellent authorities around the country?

I am glad that some of our policies are making a splash at last. We often identify examples of good practice where local authorities and partners listen to the needs of young people and open up opportunities for them to participate. That is a great thing to do. I only wish that in the Tories' manifesto at the last election they had bothered to mention the participation of young people—an absence that spoke volumes about the priority that they give to young people's needs.

In light of what my hon. Friend says about the importance of involving young people, will he join me in welcoming an initiative in Northfield, where a young people's forum has been set up and given a budget top-sliced from money devolved from the city council? Does he agree that putting in such material resources can help, but that the challenge of reaching hard-to-reach young people involves more resources going into young people's services globally?

My hon. Friend is right. It is good to hear of another example of local authorities devolving budgets to young people to enable them to take responsibility for resources and to work with other young people in their communities to ensure that their needs are met—particularly the needs of those who are disengaged or alienated from the education system.

Another scheme that has been set up in various parts of the country is that of youth banks, whereby young people control resources and have to decide which grants should go to other groups of young people in the community. That is real empowerment of young people who are participating and taking more control over their own lives.