Last week, Labour announced its manifesto, and it was full of policies that will help our service users flourish. Youth Hubs and the Young Futures programme in particular are initiatives that we are certain will do a lot to help young people flourish. We are also pleased to see the commitment to the Youth Guarantee, and reforming JobCentre Plus and apprenticeships: helping people not just find any job but find good jobs and supporting them to stay in them.
Children’s rights and safety online
Catch22:
- Commit to tackling online harms, enact Online Safety Bill, ensuring children’s safety online;
- Introduce measures that prevent vaping products being marketed to young people, such as plain packaging and banning sports sponsorship.
Labour:
- Build on the Online Safety Act, bringing forward provisions as quickly as possible, and explore further measures to keep everyone safe online;
- Ban vapes from being branded and advertised to appeal to children to stop the next generation from becoming hooked on nicotine.
Youth services and violence
Catch22:
- Implement a national strategy to tackle Child Criminal Exploitation, including County Lines;
- Invest in youth workers;
- Mandate training for professionals on youth violence;
- Invest further in the presence of youth workers in communities, to ensure the impact of the National Youth Guarantee is sustained beyond 2025;
- Ensure School Exclusion Panels consult with local experts on child exploitation, ‘gangs’ and ‘serious youth violence’ before making an exclusion decision.
Labour:
- Introduce a new offence of criminal exploitation of children;
- Every young person caught in possession of a knife to be referred to a Youth Offending Team and receive a mandatory plan to prevent reoffending, with penalties including curfews, tagging, and custody for the most serious cases;
- Intervene earlier to stop young people being drawn into crime;
- Create a new Young Futures programme, with a network of hubs reaching every community: these hubs will have youth workers, mental health support workers, and careers advisers on hand to support young people’s mental health and avoid them being drawn into crime.
Criminal justice and rehabilitation
Catch22:
- Focus on rehabilitation;
- Prioritise victims’ rights;
- Widen access to restorative justice services by placing it as a right in the Victim’s Code;
- Drive better outcomes for victims of fraud through an increase in police investigations and reduction in revictimisation.
Labour:
- Introduce new protections for victims of crime and persistent antisocial behaviour, by increasing the powers of the Victims’ Commissioner, and ensuring victims can access the information and support they need;
- Introduce a new expanded fraud strategy to tackle the full range of threats, including online, public sector, and serious fraud.
Jobs, apprenticeships, digital skills, and inclusion
Catch22:
- Publish a digital inclusion strategy and invest in ‘digital skills for work’ programmes;
- Increase the apprenticeship minimum wage;
- Increase flexibility in the apprenticeship levy so that it can be spent on pre-apprenticeship training;
- Consult on an ‘AI for good’ strategy to help build a diverse workforce, eliminate bias in hiring processes and open up job opportunities to all.
Labour:
- Guarantee training, an apprenticeship, or help to find work for all 18- to 21-year-olds;
- Reform the apprenticeship levy;
- Bring JobCentre Plus and the National Careers Service together to provide a national jobs and careers service focused on getting people into work and helping them get on at work;
- Create a flexible Growth and Skills Levy, with Skills England consulting on eligible courses to ensure qualifications offer value for money.
Care experienced young people
Catch22:
- Ensure all care experienced people are made eligible for the over 25 Universal Credit rate from the age of 18;
- Introduce Corporate Parenting Responsibilities so that organisations and government service providers are expected to treat care experienced people up to the age of 25 as their own children;
- Make ‘care experience’ a protected characteristic under the Equalities Act 2010.
Labour:
- n/a
If there is one policy area that we wish we had seen more commitment from the Labour party, it is their offering to people leaving care. While we recognise that the budget is tight, there are some low-cost changes that the next Government can bring about that would make a real difference to the life of care-experienced people, like, for example, making care a protected characteristic, which would ensure that the live outcomes and impact of care experience is measured and acted upon.