Opinion: When young people lose their services, we all pay more

by UNISON head of local government Mike Short

Keir Starmer has been under fire for the tough decisions made in the first months of his Labour Government. It’s important to remember the context for these decisions: an inheritance from the Tories of a £22bn black hole in the public purse, alongside the destruction wrought by 14 years of austerity.

The austerity plan began with £40bn worth of cuts to public services. The Tories claimed that this would result in long-term good; yet we continue to suffer from the consequences of those cuts today.

Shortly after that infamous austerity budget, the then prime minister David Cameron delivered a speech on ‘modern public service’ during which he said, “there are things that the government does today that it will have to stop doing”. Despite the tone of fiscal doom, the very first reassurance Cameron made was to continued investment in children’s services, to match spending in other major European economies.

But the reality, since 2010, has been very different – the decimation of children’s and youth services across the UK.

Cuts from central government, along with increasing demand for council services, have meant councils have been forced to do a lot more with a lot less.

UNISON research has revealed the funding gaps in every council in England, Wales and Scotland. Through Freedom of Information requests, UNISON uncovered UK-wide cumulative funding gaps of £4.3bn for 2025/26 and £8.5bn by 2026/27.

Find out the funding gap in your local council

Councils have legal obligations to provide children’s and youth services. However, this chasm in the finances of local councils has left many with no choice but to strip services back to the barest legal essentials. This has meant that between 2010 and 2023, at least 1,243 council-run youth centres and over a third (1,168) of all council-run children’s centres closed their doors.

Support outside of a classroom is something that not every child or young person will receive, in the home or elsewhere. Many children may face issues within their home that are outside of their control and may not find an outlet or a space where they feel heard at school.

For all these children and young people, children’s and youth centres can provide a safe haven for expression, learning and socialising.

And so the closures of youth centres, often alongside a lack of other facilities such as libraries, leisure centres and outdoor spaces, may leave young people even more isolated.

When children’s and youth centres close, it is not just would-be service users who suffer. Taking these services away seriously harms the life chances of young people, but also ends up costing the state a huge amount of money in the long term.

For example, the mass closure of these centres has played a major part in a record number of children joining school with speech difficulties. A 2023 report from Speech and Language UK found that 1.9 million primary and secondary school pupils were estimated to be behind with their speech and comprehension: that’s 20% of all UK pupils.

A report from Warwick University compared neighbours in a London borough where there had been drastic cuts to youth centres and found that teenagers affected by the closures scored 4% worse in their exams and were more likely to slip into crime, which would cost the state £3 for every £1 saved from the closures.

Mass closures of children’s and youth centres have robbed generations of their opportunities, and we owe it to future generations not to continue making the same mistakes. It’s vital that we end the continuous cuts that councils have faced and begin to undo the damage wreaked by years of austerity.

UNISON has long advocated for investment in public services as the best route forward. It’s now time to start properly funding our public services.

The article Opinion: When young people lose their services, we all pay more first appeared on the UNISON National site.