§ EARL MANVERS rose to call attention to anomalies arising from competition in the Service of Youth organization; and to move for Papers. The noble Earl said: My Lords, shortly after the outbreak of war it became obvious that problems would arise concerning the welfare of our young people. The darkness of the blackout, the absence of parents from home, the conditions caused by enemy action very soon created circumstances which gave cause for anxiety. Under the powerful impulse of the Board of Education, and under the stimulating affect of grants of public money, Service of Youth societies very soon sprang into being, and they started to breed and multiply in a way which forms the highest testimonial to the energy and resource of the organization concerned in promoting them. But there is an old saying that too many cooks spoil the broth. I do not believe there are many members of your Lordships' House who have the slightest idea of the number of culinary experts engaged in the preparation of this particular beverage. The congestion is partly 69 due to a certain ambiguity in the expression "Service of Youth." Is youth to serve or is it to be served? Its very ambiguity has its uses. It enables us to obtain the support, in the first place, of those economists who believe that to avoid Inflation no money ought to be spent now on any other object than that of the war, and it enables us, in the second place, to claim the support of people who, whilst they are in favour of boys' clubs, are averse from fostering a spirit of what I believe is known as militarism amongst the young. The second interpretation of the expression "Service of Youth" was undoubtedly the original one. The movement was a welfare movement pure and simple, but more recently a subtle reorientation seems to have taken place. Side by side with welfare you get what they call pre-military or recruiting organizations which try to induce our young people to undertake national service of one sort or another.
§ I want to refer, first of all, to one or two amongst a. large number of welfare organizations Firstly, yon get the Central Council of Recreative Physical Training, a most powerful body, which is being very ably conducted by the noble Viscount, Lord Hampden, and which has spread tentacles all over the country. It has, I understand, six paid representatives in the Midlands area from which I come. There is then the National Association of Boys' Clubs. I have not been able to find out much about the activities of that body, but I understand it is recognized by the Board of Education, and that it works on somewhat similar lines to those of the Central Council of Recreative Physical Training. I think I am correct in saying that it also administers grants of Government money.
§ The Army is also taking a hand in the good work, and it has appointed a local staff officer of physical training whose duty it is to provide instructors for any boys' club which may apply for them free of charge. The miners, too, are doing their best by promoting clubs for pit lads, which are financed partly out of the Welfare Fund and partly out of contributions from the county council. In addition to all those more or less modern institutions, we get well-known bodies like the Boy Scouts, the Girl Guides, the Church Lads Brigades, boys' clubs, even- 70 ing institutes, the Young Men's Christian Association—to which, by the way, I owe a special debt of gratitude for the excellent work they are doing amongst the troops in my neighbourhood—and the Young Women's Christian Association; and quite recently I have come across the Women's Junior Air Corps, of which I had not previously heard, but those responsible have been kind enough to send me a booklet since the appearance of this Motion upon the Paper. Those are what I call welfare organizations—organizations which exist for the purpose of serving youth.
§ I now come to the pre-military or recruiting organizations which exist more for the purpose of inducing youth to render national service to the country. Under that heading come the Home Guard, the Air Training Corps, the Army Cadet Corps, and the Sea Cadet Corps which His Majesty the King has recently honoured by becoming its Admiral. Needless to say I have not a word to utter against any one of those organizations. On the contrary, I should say that each one is performing such valuable services that its operations ought not to be hampered by any new rivals appearing on the scene. But there is undoubtedly, I am afraid, a certain amount of overlapping, almost amounting to internecine strife, amongst these organizations. I have had letters from more than one of the clergy lamenting that the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides, to which he or his wife have devoted many years of attention and service, are in danger of being blown out of the water by the subsidized competition of pioneer clubs run by the county councils under the auspices of the Government.
§ A curious coincidence is that two of the clergymen who have written to me have made reference to the cave Adullam. Now the cave Adullam, if I remember aright, was the cave to which David escaped when he was fleeing from Saul and to which various debtors and other discontented folk who took service under his banner, were drawn. Similarly I am told that the boy scouts who are reproved for breach of duty, or for lack of discipline, are apt to throw up their membership of the Boy Scouts and join these new pioneer dubs where they can get free entertainment at the public expense. The Diocesan youth Committee has applied for a grant 71 under this scheme, and has been refused, pending unification with other religious bodies with which it may or may not see eye to eye in matters of doctrine. The matter is not free from difficulty, and it affords further evidence of the very great amount of competition that there is in the Service of Youth movement at the moment. And so the question arises whether at this time, when warship weeks are the order of the day, we are justified in keeping more cats than can catch mice. Are we justified in making confusion worse confounded by appointing county organizers and assistant organizers to promote further Pioneer Clubs? Is the system a good system under which well-meaning philanthropists and paid organizers compete for the patronage of children bewildered by the amount of limelight which is now shed upon them? Will the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, who answers with such charm and wisdom for the Board of Education, say whether there is not a risk of too many cooks spoiling the very excellent broth? I beg to move.
§ THE PAYMASTER-GENERAL (LORD HANKEY)My Lords, the Motion of the noble Earl, Lord Manvers, can be dealt with under three main heads among a long list of youth organizations, physical training organizations, and the national voluntary organizations of the Youth Service Squads. Now if we take the physical training organizations first, the Central Council of Recreative Physical Training, which the noble Lord referred, was formed in 1935, well before the war. Its purpose was to bring into one body the various organizations concerned with physical training and active recreation, especially for the post-school age groups—that is, the fourteen to sixteen and the sixteen to eighteen groups—and to avoid overlapping between them. It is subsidized by the Board of Education. Its main function is to attract young people, soon after they have left school, to participate in recreative physical training and in all forms of healthy outdoor activities, and also to train leaders.
It is not a grant-making body, and it has no local units. It works with the local education authorities, voluntary organizations and commercial and industrial concerns. Most of the voluntary organizations rely wholly or largely upon 72 the Council for the maintenance of the physical side of their work, so that this Council has an important co-ordinating function. Physical training organizers of local education authorities are concerned mainly with the supervision and development of physical training in the schools. At the inception of the Youth Service the Board of Education took steps, through His Majesty's Inspectors, to ensure close co-operation locally between the officers of the Central Council, the physical training organizers and the other officers of the local education authorities. The object of this was to enable local resources in physical training to cover the ground as far as they could in view of the drawing into the Services of over 50 per cent. of the physical training teachers and organizers employed.
In spite of these measures, however, the available personnel cannot cover the whole ground. As a result of the heavy calls of military requirements the Army physical training staff are not to any appreciable extent available to work on the educational side, although, as I have said, that was the occupation of many of them before the war. Indeed the War Office have, up to the present, been unable to co-operate with the Board in making more readily available, for work with the post-school age groups, suitable serving physical training instructors. War Office help is at the present moment limited to a few "fitness-for-service" centres run by the Central Council of Recreative Physical Training, which are open to adults as well as to young people. There are also in a very few cases local arrangements made between local education authorities and such military units as happen to be serving in their areas: so there is an acute shortage of trained physical training staffs to deal with the school and post-school age groups. That is the first group; the physical training group.
I come now to the national voluntary organisations, of which the noble Earl gave a pretty full list. They are the National Association of Boys' Clubs, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, Church Lads Brigade, the Young Men's Christian Association and the Young Women's Christian Association. I shall come to one or two of the others mentioned by the noble Earl. Before the war these organizations were catering for not more than twenty to twenty-five per cent. of post-school boys 73 and girls. Their membership has been generally increased as a result of the Youth Service policy, but it would certainly be optimistic to say that even to-day they cater for more than about thirty to thirty-five per cent. There is therefore a very wide field open to them without any risk of overlapping. I think the noble Earl made mention of the Miners' Welfare Clubs. They are not confined to pit lads or pit lasses, but arc open to the whole local juvenile population. The Miners Welfare Committee works in close association with the National Association of Boys' Clubs and the National Council of Girls' Clubs. This is especially noticeable in the Midlands coalfield.
Certain of the organizations were classed by the noble Earl as "pre-military." I would rather say they are pre-Service organizations. These include, as the noble Earl said, the Sea Cadets, the Cadet Force and the Air Training Corps. These work in very close harmony and co-operation with local education authorities, with schools and voluntary organizations. Cadet and Air Training Corps units may be either separate units or units based on school or voluntary organizations or groups of separate organizations. Where they are separate units they rely largely upon the local education authorities and voluntary organizations for their access to social and recreational training. Where they are formed in schools and youth organizations the members benefit by the facilities offered by those schools and organizations. It is the declared policy of the three Service Departments to collaborate with local education authorities and voluntary organizations, and to develop their cadet training not on narrow pre-service military lines but on broad educational lines. Then there are the Pioneer Clubs. They are confined to Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Their business is to provide healthy outdoor recreation for young people in the villages. They are not run by the "county council". They started in 1940 and, as newcomers in the rural field, they have been looked on with rather a critical eye by the Young Farmers' Clubs; but I am assured no evidence has been brought forward of overlapping.
Then we come last of all to the Youth Service Squads. These are known to contain at least 60,000 young people. They are doing useful national and communal 74 service, voluntarily and in their leisure time. They may be formed within existing youth organizations and centres or as separate units. There is no evidence of rivalry; on the contrary, they have in many cases served as a useful means of recruitment to existing organizations. Furthermore, they bring within the ambit of the Youth Service large numbers of boys and girls who had not previously been attracted by any youth organization. In fact the fundamental policy of the Youth Service is to bring together in the local youth committees the local education authorities, the voluntary organizations and indeed all those who are concerned with the welfare and training of young people. I think that is really the answer about this alleged overlapping. A great many of these organizations, the vast majority, existed long before the war and long before the Youth Service, and the object of the Youth Service—far from disrupting or making rival services—is to bring them to work together. I dare say in the difficult circumstances of the day, when it is so hard to obtain personnel for all the different Government and local services, there may have been overlapping in cases, but I suggest that the organizations must be given time to straighten it up in the localities and especially to stop the internecine strife to which the noble Earl referred.
I ought perhaps to say a word about cost, as the question has been raised whether the county organizations arc justified in these days. Grants are made to local voluntary organizations only on the recommendation of the local education authority and the Youth Committee, and then only after investigation, by the Board, of the merits of each case. Grants are allowed only where the applicant organization can, in the first place, be shown to be making (or at least to be capable of making) a real contribution to the local Youth Service provision, and, in the second place, to be in need of funds for that purpose. The provision by local education authorities of aid to the local youth organizations is no new idea. The authorities have held this power and exercised it since 1918. The present system of direct grants from the Board was instituted after the outbreak of the present war. Its purpose was to safeguard the local youth organizations from the extinction which the majority of them 75 would otherwise have suffered as a result of loss of leaders and premises, and the drying up of voluntary sources of income. The grants are carefully administered, and any allegations of wasteful or duplicated expenditure would, of course, be investigated by the Board of Education.
It would seem to me, my Lords, that these organizations are very much justified and that the Youth Service, in particular, is very important for the purpose of bringing these organizations together and coordinating their activities. In the earlier debate on education we heard certain remarks about the evil of various juvenile delinquencies, and surely to combat that admitted evil the most valuable method is to induce these young people, who have passed from school, to enter these organizations where their energies are deflected into a better cause—in the case of the pre-Service organizations into fitting themselves for the time when they will be entering the Services. I hope therefore that the noble Earl will see his way to accept that view.
§ LORD JESSELMy Lords., may I ask the noble Lord before he resumes his seat where all these bodies get grants? Do all of them get them—all these various youth organizations—and are these grants all made by the Board of Education? I understood the noble Lord to say that they were made by the Board of Education. Surely in the case of the Boy Scouts, and the Cadets and other bodies, which existed before the war, the grants came from other sources. The War Office surely gave a grant to the Cadets. Is the granting of assistance now taken away from the Admiralty and the War Office, and the Air Ministry and given to the Board of Education?
§ LORD HANKEYMy Lords, in reply to the noble Lord, Lord Jessel, I have 76 to say that aid is provided for voluntary organizations either through local authorities or direct from the Board. The Board and the local authorities aid all the principal voluntary organizations, but it would not be true to say they aid all the voluntary organizations that exist.
§ LORD JESSELI thought other Departments than the Board of Education were concerned.
§ LORD HANKEYI am told that it is the local education authorities, not the War Office, who help some of the bodies. The Service Departments, of course, aid the pre-Service training of Cadets.
§ EARL MANVERSMy Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his interesting and informative reply, and I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for the now unnecessary Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.