Liberal Democrat budget - children & young people

Speech by Cllr David Turner delivered to County Council on Tue 10th Feb 2009

In difficult funding circumstances where in real terms Government revenue grants have declined this year, the Liberal Democrat budget seeks to improve the situation facing the younger generation of Oxfordshire.

Our children's services budget is increased by £800K, some £300K more extra investment than in the Conservative budget before you.

My colleague has talked about the extra £250K to return the early years funding for work with children at risk.

We have also included £100K more for outreach youth work. This is an area where we can make a real difference to support many disaffected young people, which will undoubtedly save the County Council's Social Services and the Police a lot of time and money in the future. This is a real investment in the future.

We have chosen not to take the savings proposals which would reduce the availability of educational and social work apprenticeships. The demise of apprenticeships has been a tragedy in the UK. Contrast this with more enlightened countries, such as Switzerland, which copied and then developed our original concept of engineering apprenticeships into providing apprenticeships for most aspects of work, thereby providing real relevant work training.

Our one-off grant to Home Start recognises the valuable work done by them in the past and the vast wealth of experience they have and which should not be lost.

We have in the capital programme included money for youth centres provided at local area expense to help improve buildings to be fit for purpose. It is not wrong that we provide capital and revenue for youth facilities in the City and Towns, but it is when we ignore the rural areas. The "Chill Out" funds have been welcome but they are available to all communities. Our extra funding is designed as a start to helping those communities, particularly rural ones, which are prepared to help themselves and bring a degree of fairness into youth service provision.

We need to tackle our failure to attract youth workers even when parishes, like my own village of Chalgrove, are prepared to fund them from their own money.

Finally, the loss of a star rating following the last Government review of our Education Service and our poor but improving performance compared to our statistical neighbours is worrying. I hope that the current scrutiny review panel looking into educational attainment and particularly into leadership issues will contribute towards an improved performance in future.