Over £1.5 million of new City Hall funding for early intervention and youth engagement projects in Enfield has been welcomed by local London Assembly Member, Joanne McCartney AM. This investment has been announced as part of the Mayor’s £45 million Young Londoners Fund, of which a further £16.4 million was released this week to support over 100,000 more young Londoners over the next three years.
This comes against the backdrop of new analysis of Government figures which has revealed that funding for youth services across London has been slashed by a total of £132 million between 2010/11 and 2018/19.
In 2018, to mitigate the impact of Government cuts, the Mayor of London established his £45 million Young Londoners Fund which aims to deliver activities and early intervention initiatives across the capital, targeted at those most vulnerable to becoming caught up in crime.
It has been announced that out of the latest round of funding, Enfield has received over £1.5 million to support several local projects. The largest scheme, ‘Inspiring Young Enfield’, is a community led programme of over 20 local partners co-ordinated by the Council, which has been given £1.3 million to improve the emotional and physical health, employment, mentoring and learning opportunities and access to sport, arts and culture for over 6,000 10-21 year olds over the next 3 years.
The Young Londoners Fund has also invested £208,000 in Edmonton Community Partnership’s ‘Dream, Believe, Succeed’ programme, which aims to engage children in the performing arts and offer mentoring support to those at risk of exclusion from school or becoming involved in crime.
Providing activities for our young people is part of a public health approach to tackle and prevent youth violence and give London’s young people opportunities to realise their potential. The Mayor set up England’s first Violence Reduction Unit in 2018 to operate a public health approach to prevent and tackle violence.
Local London Assembly Member, Joanne McCartney AM, said:
“We all know that youth services have an incredibly important role to play in ensuring that our young people make the right choices and can realise their potential.
“It is great to see City Hall target over £1.5 million of funding to support early intervention and youth engagement schemes in Enfield. This will help to mitigate against the significant Government cuts that the Council has faced over the last decade. These have had huge knock-on effects for local youth service provision.
“We now want to see the Government prioritising prevention measures in the fight against violent crime and better financial support for youth services is one way they can do this”.
ENDS
Notes to editors
- This week, the Mayor released a further £16.4 million of the Young Londoners Fund to support over 100,000 more young Londoners over the next three years;
- Analysis of the latest available figures published by the Department of Education, between 2010/2011 and 2018/2019, budgets for youth service provision in boroughs across London were slashed by a total of £132 million;
- According to a London Councils report, local authorities in the capital have suffered a 63% reduction in core funding from Central Government since 2010, equating to a total of £4 billion in real terms over this period. London Councils report that this has led to local authorities being forced to cut back on investment in key services in order to protect child and adult social care budgets. This has had an impact on youth services across the capital, such as leisure, cultural and sporting activities;
- We are using the definition of the term ‘youth services’ as outlined in the Government’s section 251 budget guidance for local authorities:
‘Services for young people (aged 13 to 19) encompasses all local authority expenditure on provision of educational and recreational leisure-time activities, including youth work and delivery of their duties to support young people to participate in education or training. The scope of the activities covered by this is defined in the statutory guidance issued in June 2012 by the Secretary of State for Education for local authorities on services and activities to improve young people’s well-being[1] and targeted support services for young people’ (p.49-50).
- More information about the Mayor’s Young Londoners Fund can be found here;
- A full list of projects being funded by the Young Londoners Fund, including those in Enfield, can be found here;
- More information about City Hall’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) can be found here;
- Joanne McCartney AM is the London Assembly Member for Enfield & Haringey.