Young people have criticised Croydon Council over planned cuts to a youth engagement service that gives teens a voice and gets them involved in local decision making. The council is consulting to ‘restructure’ its Youth Engagement Team (YET), but young people have said this will exclude them from playing a role in their community, and it’s claimed they weren’t even informed about the changes by the council.
Croydon Council’s YET ensures that all young people living, working, or attending schools in Croydon and their families can access the services they need. While its 30 full-time employees focus mainly on supporting vulnerable young people, the team is also responsible for providing services like the Croydon Youth Assembly (CYA).
The CYA, set up in 2021 to replace the expensive Young Mayor program, gives young people a forum to have their voices heard on issues that matter to them and provides volunteering opportunities on local projects including litter picks.
Croydon Youth Assembly Chair Gabriella Brown with Croydon’s Executive Mayor Jason Perry
(Image: Gabriella Brown)
However, Croydon Council’s staff redundancy consultation for its YET threatens the existence of programs like these. Gabriella Brown, Chair of the CYA, feels this decision will further exclude young people from participating in their community.
Gabriella, 16, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS): “Money does have to come from somewhere, but this feels like such an important thing that has been doing really visibly and measurably good things for young people. It’s been making councillors look good for a long time.
“We have sub-groups and look at an issue that matters to young people. One will focus on the environment, and the other will look at mental health. We are trying to get a community safety sub-group as well.
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“Broadly, we have been a separate thing still operating in the council. Whenever councillors come along to our events, they go on X and say ‘it’s so great to see these young people doing good things’.
“Now it just feels like a bit of a stab in the back because we have been doing all of this work that hasn’t required them to spend much money, or councillor input, but has achieved quite a lot.
“For example, when we go litter picking, we can say we’re from the Croydon Youth Assembly run by Croydon Council. This can then be seen as Croydon Council doing good things for young people.”
The CYA is run entirely by teenagers, with support from YET staff. They are responsible for helping plant over 100 trees in Croydon, mostly in collaboration with Trees for Cities. Last summer, they ran a litter pick with around 30 young people, using a grant from the National Lottery as part of the London Borough of Culture.
Croydon tops the list of London boroughs with the largest population of young people. The CYA has around 30 current members, but the services the YET provides help the 90,000 other young people in Croydon.
Gabriella told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS): “The 29 other Youth Engagement Workers are doing really important work with vulnerable young people, providing after school youth clubs, and engagement in schools. They have people telling young people what support is available to them.
“There is a thing called youth voice training, which encourages people to be more active in their community. If that is removed, it will not be available to us anymore. Every single young person needs engagement. I am not a vulnerable young person, but it’s really helped me.”
The Croydon Youth Assembly feel that young people ‘should not have to fight to help their community’
(Image: Gabriella Brown)
Gabriella told the LDRS how the CYA helped her and her friends learn various soft skills required to develop as young adults in an increasingly competitive working world. Along with regular meetings with authority figures, she cited examples of the CYA having to learn to draft their own grant applications to ensure future funding for the organisation.
Croydon Council has told the LDRS it is not cutting the service but restructuring it to provide a more ‘targeted’ approach for the borough’s most vulnerable. However, Gabriella feels it is missing the point.
She said: “I don’t think a targeted approach would work because you need the YET to engage with lots of young people because vulnerability is such a hard thing to define.
“The good thing about how it works at the moment is that the YET can spot when a young person might be vulnerable quite early, so that might lessen the stress on the statutory services the council has to provide.
“It can’t just be about young people being in trouble; it should be there to let young people know the council cares about them throughout their time at school and when they are growing up. It should be a constant, positive presence.
“Young people are already facing big challenges in their lives; there needs to be a third safe space where people can learn if they are really passionate about it. Any restructuring would jeopardise all those hours they have invested to show they care about Croydon and their community.
“It helps beat those stereotypes about young people sitting at home all day and don’t care about their community. They do, and there are loads of young people who care, and they should be helped to do that. They should not have to fight to help their community. It is just completely non-sensical.”
The CYA has since set up an online petition, calling Croydon residents to reject the council’s proposals.
Croydon’s redundancy consultation, which runs throughout Christmas until January 21, has attracted criticism from the council’s Labour opposition. The CYA was set up under the then Labour-led council in 2021.
Shadow Cabinet Member for Children and Young People and Woodside councillor Amy Foster, in particular, feels the consultation demonstrates a lack of concern for Croydon’s young people. She even revealed that members of the CYA were not initially informed of the council’s plans.
Labour councillor Amy Foster says the CYA’s ‘hard work means more of Croydon’s young people have a positive view of the council’
(Image: Croydon Council)
She told the LDRS: “The members of the CYA are incredible ambassadors for our borough. The young people in the assembly have organised community litter picks for teenagers, planted trees and attended events in Parliament to give their views on the matters that affect young people.
“Their hard work means more of Croydon’s young people have a positive view of the council and better understand how it works. It is hugely concerning that the members of the CYA were not informed of the termination of the service within the council until the staff redundancy consultation opened.
“They are understandably upset that they have not been asked about their views regarding the impact of these changes on the Youth Engagement Service and want to be able to talk about the great work that has been done over the last few years to grow the reach of the Youth Assembly. We hear again and again from the Mayor and the Cabinet that they recognise the engagement with groups affected by asset sales or changes to service delivery isn’t good enough.
“Yet it seems that once again, they have failed to inform a key group of people about a change that will have a real impact on these young people, causing a huge amount of anxiety for the members of the CYA over the Christmas break.
“As the Shadow Cabinet Member for Children and Young People, I would urge the Mayor to meet with the members of the CYA but also to ensure that there is an opportunity for this decision to be scrutinised effectively, either via a Cabinet meeting or the formal scrutiny process.”
A spokesperson for Croydon Council said: “The proposal is not to stop youth engagement work but to deliver it differently so that we are targeting those young people who most need help. As we will be focusing on preventative work with young people who are at risk, this should reduce the number of young people coming into contact with statutory services, not increase it.”
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