News

A significant proportion of youth offending teams’ work and resources could be passed to new targeted youth support teams from 2008, the youth green paper has revealed.

Youth Matters, finally published this week after months of delay, states that the Youth Justice Board, the Home Office and the Department for Education and Skills have agreed that Yots should maintain their role delivering targeted youth crime prevention programmes “during the current spending review period”.

However, they would be expected to do this in conjunction with local partners in children’s trusts and crime and disorder reduction partnerships, while preparing to devolve to local authorities the elements of their budget relating to the prevention of youth crime and substance misuse beyond this date.

“We would explore the best way of merging and devolving these budgets to local authorities while ensuring an increased impact on youth crime and drugs,” the paper states.

Responsibilities of targeted youth support teams – to be set up by children’s trusts’ new integrated youth support services – would include identifying early those young people in need of additional support or intervention, carrying out in-depth assessments of young people, and delivering effective preventive work for groups of young people.

The paper also confirms the demise of Connexions as a national service, and the survival of some of its local partnerships where children’s trusts, schools or colleges choose to commission them to continue to deliver elements of their current work.

Although the green paper’s emphasis on the provision of more quality local activities and the involvement of young people in the design and delivery of services has been unanimously welcomed by the sector, serious concerns remain around funding. This follows the government’s admission in the green paper that all its proposals “will be financed within available resources during the 2004 spending review period”.


Organisations including the Association of Directors of Education and Children’s Services, the National Youth Agency, and the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services warned that “although a duty on local authorities to provide services for youth may help to clarify existing responsibilities, any new duties will need to be backed by sufficient funding to turn the vision into reality”.

Children’s charity NCH added: “We are worried that a shortage of funds could mean that some of the creative ideas in the paper may never actually be put into practice.”