Sometimes, the results of public policy interventions are uncertain. But a working paper published this week by the Institute for Fiscal Studies on how cuts to youth clubs affected teenage crime and education is not one of them.
Back in the prelapsarian world of 2009, 40 per cent of Londoners aged between 11 and 16 reported attending an after-school programme at least once a week. These were free youth clubs where teenagers could socialise outside of school hours, with access to youth workers, activities, workshops, often including music and sport.
These schemes were usually funded by local authorities, which suffered substantial cuts during the 2010s. As councils were forced to focus their limited spending on statutory services, youth programmes were cut. Consequently, 30 per cent of youth clubs in the capital closed between 2010 and 2019.
Carmen Villa, author of the IFS working paper, compared offending rates and exam results among teenagers living in a region where all local youth clubs within a 40-minute walk shut, with those whose nearest club remained open. The two key results are as follows:
1. Teenagers whose nearest youth club shut did less well in school. Villa finds that young people in London who lost access to a nearby youth club performed almost 4 per cent of a standard deviation worse in their GCSEs. This is roughly equivalent to a drop in half a grade in one subject. But the impact was more severe for students from lower socio-economic backgrounds (in this case, defined as being entitled to free school meals) whose scores fell by nearly one grade.
2. Youth club closures led to a rise in offending. Young people who lost access to a youth club were 14 per cent more likely to engage in criminal activity within six years, in particular theft, shoplifting, drug offences and violent crimes.
The paper makes clear that youth clubs did not merely displace criminal activity. That is because after a closure, young people were not committing more crime during hours they previously might have been at a youth club, but rather at all hours. This indicates that the sort of structured activities and support provided by youth clubs "helped keep young people out of trouble more generally."
As for the bean counting, given the cost to the economy and society of lower exam results (which mean people earn less over their lifetime) and crime (costly to the state and victims alike) any savings accrued by cutting youth clubs appear to have been a false economy. Indeed, the research states that "for every £1 saved from closing youth clubs, there are societal costs of nearly £3."
Back to where we started. Even if none of this comes as a total shock, it is still extremely valuable to have some hard evidence to confirm what many already suspected.
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