The news that Gordon Brown wants to encourage youth group participation in things like the Scouts, and military cadet forces, is, it has to be said, quite a welcome move. However, as with most approaches by Labour the solution is, it appears, always one that involves throwing money at things by making a flawed assessment about causality.
For Labour it seems that everything comes down to spending, sorry, investment. Decline is funding is placed on a graph next to decline in attendance and an inductive assumption about causality is made between the two. It is certainly true that the slow decline of funding over successive government will have had an impact, however, there are, it seems other factors throwing money at things ignores.
Part of the problem stems as well from the law, rules and regulations that we have created about how such organisations must be run. There are rules about how many adults an organisation must have to the number of attendees. There are rules about vetting which start from the basic assumption that if you want to work with children (and especially if you're a man) there maybe something suspect about it.
This has created, as the Manifesto Club has pointed out, a decline in willing adults to work (for free) with such groups. For example, it will soon be a crime for a father to help out with his son;s football team unless he has had a criminal records check to see if he is a paedophile. Hobby clubs have started closing their doors to under-18 because of these vetting rules as well.
It seems clear that unless we have a serious review of the impact that blanket vetting of mostly innocent people has had on the decline of attendance at youth groups throwing more funding at the groups will be unlikely to resolve the problem. If you cannot get the adults to help run such schemes then no amount of money will change the situation after all.
The vetting process we now have means that, for example, if a parent wants to help out at a school disco for a few hours they are, required by law, to be vetted. It costs the Scouts Association £250,000 a year on vetting which is an ongoing cost. Whilst extra-funding would help, they continue to have the problem that adults simply don;t want to engage with a process that treats them as suspects.
Read more on the Case Against Vetting.
1 comment:
Did the Scouts ever get state funding? I doubt it.
Labour think that every service should be provided by the state - why? Because once funded by the state politicians (Labour ones) can push an organisation around and use it to further their aims.
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