Conservative Conference 2011: Young people should audit local youth services, declares Loughton

Addressing a Conservative Party Conference fringe event chaired by Children & Young People Now editor Ravi Chandiramani, Loughton argued that all councils should be testing the quality of their services to make sure they live up to the demands of young people.

"The biggest way in which we should judge whether youth services are working or not is by using young people to assess the services themselves," he said. "We need more youth mayors, more UK Youth Parliament members and more youth councils playing a role.

"We’re not going to be prescriptive and say that every town must have a youth mayor, but I want every local authority to have a recognised body of young people who have the keys to the town hall effectively, so they are recognised as being the voice of local young people and have some sort of auditing role."

Loughton added that the young auditors could be asked to produce annual reports, which judge "exactly how well the local authority is doing in partnership with other providers on the youth offer in their area".

"I want these reports to be entirely transparent," he said. "Then, nationally, we might do an audit of how certain authorities seem to be doing very well in the eyes of young people and others not so. We can use that as a tool to spread best practice.

"This is about a new way of viewing services and a new way of inspecting and auditing services where young people are at the heart. Youth services have been largely unreformed for too many years. This should have happened a long time ago."

Hafsah Ali, a young campaigner from the charity Battlefront, backed Loughton’s call to use young people to inspect youth services.

She added that her local authority is already involving young people in inspecting services, but said that councils and charities need to do more to promote participation opportunities to young people.

"I’m a young adviser to Leicester City Council," she said. "They’re doing some great work in terms of assessing children and young people’s services. We actually do have the keys to the town hall in Leicester. We have the ID cards to get in and we have our own office. It’s definitely essential that young people get to have a say in decision making."