Young people have faced “violent indifference” from the political establishment for decades, leaving them struggling to navigate a changing world, the culture secretary said as she announced the first national youth strategy in 15 years.
In an interview with the Guardian, Lisa Nandy said young people today were the most digitally connected but also the most isolated generation, adding that more could be done to police online spaces under new laws.
She said too many of them did not believe politics could be a force for good, so were turning away from mainstream parties including Labour. The youth strategy could “put them back in the driving seat of their own lives”, Nandy added.
The Youth Matters plan, backed by £500m, aims to give 500,000 more young people access to a trusted adult outside their home, boost resilience and teach skills including how to stay safe online.
There will also be up to 250 new or refurbished youth clubs over the next four years, 50 hubs providing access to professional support – including in Birmingham, Nottingham and County Durham – and new support for youth workers.
“There’s an urgency to this. The most connected and the most isolated generation in history, with a significant number of young people who don’t feel safe in their daily lives, in no small part because of what is happening online, and England is an outlier,” Nandy said.
“So although these are global trends when it comes to loneliness, wellbeing and healthy relationships, we are doing far worse than many comparable countries because we’ve put young people last for two decades.
“It’s violent indifference to an entire generation of young people who’ve grown up with a new set of challenges that the adults who want to support them can’t navigate ourselves and a systematic stripping away of the systems that were there to support them.”
The culture secretary, who launched the strategy at an event in Peckham, south London, said youngsters had been shaped by the Covid pandemic, the cost of living crisis, global uncertainty and an always-on digital world.
“It is a perfect storm that has hit this generation that’s been going on in plain sight for far too long,” she said, warning the online world remained toxic despite child protection measures in the Online Safety Act coming in over the summer. However, she said most young people did not want an Australian-style social media ban.
“The challenge with banning social media is enforcement. Are we really saying as a country that we’re going to start prosecuting under-18s for using social media? Instead, what they wanted was the help and support to both police and to navigate the online space in the same way as you would in the real world.”
Giving more young people a place to go, access to a trusted adult – whether that was a youth worker, teacher or sports coach – and more enrichment activities for working-class children could all help them make meaningful real-life connections, she said.
Local government spending on youth services fell by 73% between 2010-11 and 2022-23, with more than 1,000 youth centres closing and more than 4,500 youth worker roles lost.
“At the root of all of this is self-worth … They matter. They haven’t felt that they matter for a very long time, and that, in turn, makes them very vulnerable, whether it’s to gangs exploiting them to run drugs across county lines or it’s these online influencers who are preying on them.”
Nandy said: “There too many people in this country who feel that government is something that exists to stop them from living the lives they want to live, not enabling them to live the lives that they want to live. That’s very acute amongst young people.”
But it would not change by lecturing them to go out to vote. “Absolutely not. Can we do it by genuinely empowering people to make that change in their own lives? … Yes, I think we can. That’s why this national youth strategy is important … because we put them back in the driving seat of their own lives to make the change that they need.”
