Gordon Brown hosts a Cabinet meeting with a difference to highlight the Government’s new ten-year youth strategy.
Read the transcript for the film below:
Gordon Brown:
Good to see you all. Have you made all your decisions yet?
Good to see you. Nice to meet you. How are you doing?
Wilf Petheridge:
This is really exciting. I’m really proud to be here. I think we’re all quite privileged to be sitting around this table.
Gordon Brown:
I want to welcome you here. I hope you will enjoy the discussion here. I think this Youth Review is really good. And I think some of the proposals you put forward, we’ve got to help you implement them. You’re in charge. Get on with it.
Beverley Hughes:
As Gordon said, I think the work that you’ve been doing through Make Space, and the consultations
we’ve been doing with young people in other ways, have been important in informing the strategy we’ll be announcing today. And I just think, as well as improving facilities for you, opening up opportunities, it’s also about saying to the British public, “Look, we’ve got fantastic young people in this country, and we need to start celebrating them.”
Boy:
What the review has brought up is that young people believe that they do not have a place to go outside school. But what we are calling for is youth centres all around the country.
Girl:
Studios - I think that’s a big thing with young people at the moment. They like going to studios.
Gordon Brown:
Music studios?
Girl:
Yes.
Boy:
Dance?
Girl:
And dance studios, yeah.
Ed Balls:
Is it my turn yet? I didn’t get home until late, and I’m afraid the Prime Minister keeps us too busy to go home. But when I’ve talked to young people about the review, the thing that they’ve consistently said is that they want to be involved in planning it. And sometimes you want a place to hang out. But a lot of times people want decent things to actually do.
Ed Milliband:
I want to ask a question, partly about what you’ve done in Lewisham and partly what we’re trying to do, which is, when young people are controlling budgets, what difference that has made to you.
Boy:
Councils are spending money on things which they believe to be good for young people, so it’s their point of view. It’s not essentially young people’s points of view. We are sort of, like, mature enough when we can actually sort of say,”If we were to get a certain amount of money, we’re not going to put PlayStations in every single home”. We’re actually going to spend it on things which make a difference.
Boy 2:
There’s a lot of things out there that people don’t know about, and they’re underfunded, so they can’t take on a lot of kids.
Boy:
The younger-than-GCSE period need more spaces where parents know they can be safe.
Girl:
There’s not that much to actually do in the holidays, so people do end up hanging around and that sort of thing. And even the stuff that there is to do costs money. So you can’t do it, like, every single day of the week.
Girl 2:
We should do more to link maybe the local sport centres to our schools.
Boy:
More things need to be provided, I mean, especially before 14, because I think it’s by 14 is when people start to get into things like crime if there’s not much to do.
Boy 2:
I think we could have some sort of Leisure Card that would enable us to get into gyms, local sport centres, and perhaps even art studios.
Gordon Brown:
What’s fascinating is I think there’s a range of different activities that you clearly feel are not available to you. Over the next few years we want to extend the range of facilities, but we want you to be making the choices. So we’ve got to find a way of gauging just how much demand there is for certain things, so we can know in advance that you’re not going to build a facility that nobody’s going to use. You’re going to get something that people are actually going to want and feel happy with. So we’re going to leave you to make
all the other decisions.
Boy:
Thank you.
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