Budget 2014 - What`s Next For Youth And Children Services?

Since George Osborne delivered the 2014 Budget to Parliament last week a raging debate has arisen among practitioners of services for children and young people.

This has been concerned with cuts to departmental spending and lack of references to young people. So how will the budget impact the life of children and young people over the coming years? Unfortunately it seems that in the last budget young people have not been a priority, which means that across the sector we may need to find ways of doing more with less.

So what is missing from the budget? `Doing more with less` has been established as the current motto of the Budget 2014, with £3.6 billion of cuts coming across government. Between 2009/10 and 2013/14 local government was also affected by a 33% funding cut from central government. The result will be a real challenge to the quality and possibly existence of youth services such as out-of school activities and youth clubs, as these are not mandatory under local authorities` provisions.

There is also a risk of heightened pressure on employment and housing for young people. Under 25s represent 20% of the country`s unemployed. In addition, young people in work are often facing underemployment, resulting in instability and difficulties to access affordable housing, and according to the Prince`s Trust Youth Index 2014 40% of jobless young people have developed mental illness conditions. There have been repeated calls from the sector for this alarming situation to be acknowledged.

So what is in the budget for young people? Next to these budget cuts, the only benefits for the children and youth sector have been small side payments.

Libor fines worth £10m nationwide will be directed to charities through the Youth United Network, instead of military charities as previously. Organisations carrying out social action will benefit from a 30% income tax relief in order to improve investments towards with a social purpose. 100,000 grants will be awarded under the Apprenticeships Grants for Employers (AGE) as well as £20 million for post-graduate apprenticeships. These are welcome additions, but we are unsure whether they will counter-balance the cuts in other departmental services.

What`s next? On the back of this budget, there is a clear challenge for the future of the children and youth sector. There is a risk of long-term consequences by reducing early intervention and prevention programmes today, and this would increase the volume of work for charities which are already under pressure and operating with limited resources.

The impact on the sector is potentially huge. In response to the pressure to do more with less, partnership, collaboration and learning from good evidence of best-practice will be increasingly important to deliver programmes that work for children and young people.