Local Authorities (Youth Expenditure) (Hansard, 3 December 1996)

§ Mr. Andrew Rowe (Mid-Kent)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require local authorities to take into account the priorities of young people in allocating expenditure. The Bill addresses one of the important political issues of our day. While we here debate the management of the great public services such as health, education, housing or social security, a silent revolution is occurring which, if left unnoticed for much longer, could destroy this place and render all that we do here of no effect.

The young people of the nation do not feel involved in the government of the country. Not only do they despise us politicians; they refuse to vote in elections. At the last general election, the number of 18 to 24-year-olds who did not vote rose to 45 per cent. There are signs that they will be joined in their indifference by the succeeding cohort of first-time voters. If those trends continue, the claim of this place to represent the nation will be badly undermined.

While we spend much of our time here passing laws to regulate in finest detail the acceptable materials for building houses in areas of special landscape importance or the breeds of dog that can or cannot be bought in pet shops, the future of our democratic society is coming into question. Our young people are steadily marching away from electoral involvement. The aim of the Bill is to arrest that desertion.

Under the Bill, local authorities would be required to set aside a proportion of their revenue support grant income for expenditure requested by young people. Unlike existing arrangements for funding the youth service, for example, the money could be spent only in response to proposals submitted by young people. If they knew that some of their ideas were assured of funding, they would have an incentive to connect with the political process. At the moment, only a tiny handful of would-be career politicians and a slightly larger number of single-issue enthusiasts see any purpose in taking part in politics.

Wherever I go, I meet young people who ask why politicians pay no attention to them. "You never ask us what we think. Even if you occasionally do, you don't pay any attention to our ideas, and nothing changes," they say. The younger generation have no desire to run society, but they want to be taken seriously by those who do.

In May, an ad hoc organisation, Heirs to the Millennium, which I chair, set out to collect young people's ideas for party manifestos, and submitted them to the party leaders. The young predicted that nothing would come of it. They will all be mightily surprised if they are taken seriously by the party policy-makers, and even more surprised if any effort is made to tell them what part their suggestions played in the discussions. Their justified cynicism is one reason why I am introducing the Bill.

Some local authorities are beginning to think about how consultation might be introduced. In Croydon, for example, an alliance of the mayor and Madam Speaker's predecessor—it is no surprise that it was my right hon. and noble Friend Lord Weatherill who set up the Speaker's commission on citizenship—has established 817 a forum for young people, which is beginning to have some influence on how the authority creates policy. Leeds and York have taken some steps, and I understand that a group in Edinburgh is trying to establish a youth parliament. In Birmingham, the city council convened a young people's group to discuss the budget and was salutarily asked by one 17-year-old how it had managed to lose several million pounds that was unaccounted for.

In my experience, young people nearly always have valuable ideas to offer and new insights to bring to the problems that bedevil us all. Most local authorities have no idea how to involve young people, and actually could not care less. If local authorities had a sum of money that could be spent only in response to ideas submitted by young people, they would undoubtedly facilitate the creation of channels for collecting and evaluating such ideas.

The matter is urgent. With every year that passes, we are pushing the age at which young people become self-determining adults further and further into middle age. For many of the most able and creative people in Britain, the age at which they feel welcome to play a responsible part in adult society is beyond the age at which Pitt became Prime Minister, and close to the age at which Alexander the Great died. Add to that the pressures on them when they first enter work, which discourage them from taking an active role in the cumbersome and time-consuming structures through which we normally work, and it can be seen how huge is the swathe of people whose opinions and experiences we disregard.

I use the word "experience" advisedly, because there are many areas of modern life in which the young alone have any serious "street cred". Who, for example, knows about drugs in the playground or the disco, or gangs or bullying—the young, who experience such things every day, or Members of Parliament, councillors and local government officials? For most of us, the youth culture that creates so many tensions in our communities is a closed book. If we are lucky, it may be selectively opened for us by our children. We have virtually no first-hand experience of its dangers and opportunities.

I believe that, if we required local authorities to hypothecate a sum of money to be released solely on the application of young people, we would kill several birds with one stone. We would encourage young people to make sensible plans to improve the communities in which they live; we would give them a sense of ownership of what was done as a result; we would find all sorts of new ways in which to approach some of our problems or be reassured that we were not missing obvious tricks.

818 I have no doubt that many councillors and council officers will panic at the idea and claim that, with all the many claims on council resources, there is no scope for any other activity, and they will be paranoid about the chance of some of the money being wasted. To argue thus is to argue mindlessly.

Everyone in the House can quote appalling examples of spectacular wastefulness that has been incurred by the very people who are the quickest to refuse to give responsibility to others. I have little doubt that the cost of meetings called simply to monitor the runaway expenditure on the British library exceeds any sum that is likely to be made available to young people if my Bill were to become law.

I am not suggesting additional expenditure. Indeed, I would be out of order to do so in a ten-minute Bill. I merely suggest that some of the money currently spent would be at least as well spent at the instance of young people. I believe that, if young people were given the responsibility for putting into practice ideas that they themselves had put forward and could call on the sort of support available to councillors, we would see a cost-effectiveness in delivering those projects that would be the envy of many local authority auditors.

We have to find new ways to make our young people able and willing to share in the governance of this land. After all, they will inherit it. They will have to pick up our mistakes, and will have to look after us in our old age. If we leave them on the outside and dismiss their hopes, fears, ideas and aspirations as irrelevant to the serious business of politics, we may wake up one day to find this place and all its local authority creations up and down the country sent packing by a generation whose views of our meanderings would echo Oliver Cromwell's.

My Bill is a tiny step towards demonstrating real interest in the younger generation and a small attempt to enlist their enthusiasm, experience, competence and idealism in solving the problems that we here find so hard to deal with. I hope that the House will give me leave to introduce it.