Josh Newbury

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon East (Natasha Irons), a fellow ageing millennial, for securing this debate. I speak not only as a parent who would love to see well-funded youth services, but as somebody who has witnessed the consequences of short-term thinking when it comes to youth services. In 2014, Conservative-led Staffordshire county council took the callous and short-sighted decision to close our youth service completely. The complete emptiness of the Opposition Benches speaks volumes about whether the Conservatives’ attitude to youth services has improved in the past 11 years. For them, this was a line on a budget sheet, but for communities in my county it was the closure of 38 youth clubs and the loss of 400 jobs. However, the real cost of these decisions lies not in numbers but in the experiences of young people in my constituency. The day-to-day impact of cuts often goes unnoticed, but the long-term impact is impossible to ignore. As an antidote to the gloomy picture that I may have painted, I will mention a couple of the incredible organisations that, despite the closure of our youth service, are doing incredible work. The Staffordshire Council of Voluntary Youth Services, fondly known as SCVYS, offers practical support to charities and local groups and ensures that the voices of children and young people are heard. The VYSIONS youth service was created by children and young people in Brereton and Rugeley and provides a range of programmes and activities, from shooting and fishing to arts and crafts, in some of our most deprived white working-class communities. I welcome the investment announced by the Government but, in closing, I urge the Minister to ensure that that funding is front-loaded in areas, such as Staffordshire, that have no council youth services left whatsoever. I sympathise with colleagues who represent inner-city areas and have seen deep cuts, but I ask them to imagine a world in which their youth service no longer exists at all: that is the world that my constituents have lived in for the past eleven years. All of us here have the highest hopes for our young people, and I am incredibly glad that once again we have a Government that do too.