Good afternoon and welcome to the Women and Equalities Committee. This is another session in our series of panels on community cohesion. I am delighted to say that we will have two panels of experts today. On our first panel, we have Lara Thompson, UK government affairs manager for the King’s Trust; Isabella Pereira, interim co-director of research for the Institute for Community Studies at the Young Foundation; Lucy Lees, chief executive officer at Mahdlo youth zone, which is part of the OnSide network; and Tanya Vice, project manager at the Heart of Sidley community association. Welcome to you all, and thank you for coming. If at any stage you think you want to go into greater detail, or if there is data that you think we should see as a Committee, don’t feel that you have to go into great detail now; you can always send it to us afterwards. I will hand over to Christine to begin.

I am Christine Jardine, an MP for Edinburgh. Thank you very much for coming to give evidence to this inquiry about youth services and their role in making young people feel part of their communities. Starting with Isabella—if you don’t mind me calling you Isabella—what would you say are the key challenges today that young people experience when it comes to feeling part of their communities?

Thank you for asking me this question. Throughout my evidence to this Committee, I am going to return to two key learnings from our work. First, having safe places to go and positive activities to be involved in matters immensely to young people, so we need to invest in our shared civic places and social infrastructure, where people can learn, create and be together, and make sure that they really work for young people. Secondly, young people really want to be heard, so involving them in decision making is absolutely critical. Our work has demonstrated, time and again, that young people can generate incredibly effective solutions to the challenges that they face. What are the challenges that young people face? First of all, we have been doing work through a programme called the Peer Action Collective, which is a network driven by and for young people at risk of, or living with, experiences of violence. PAC gives young people a chance to make their communities safer and fairer through peer research and social action, and more than 12,000 young people have been involved in that in England and Wales. The young people we engaged with told us that they felt that violence was one of the biggest issues that they faced. Violence is potentially all around them, within their communities, on their phones through social media, and in the physical spaces that they travel through, in their neighbourhoods. The Peer Action Collective is funded by the Youth Endowment Fund, whose “Children, Violence and Vulnerability” survey for 2025 also highlights that challenge. It tells us that in the past year 18% of young people experienced violence as a victim and 13% admitted to carrying out violence themselves. Also, 70% had seen real-world violence shared on social media in the past year, so that is an important and real challenge for young people. Mental health difficulties are another major challenge for young people. These are widespread, and young people shared how these challenges, and the lack of suitable support, could push them away from positive environments and influences and towards riskier behaviours. Finally, feeling unsafe, in both the physical and emotional senses, was a key issue for young people. PAC young people talked about needing to feel safe and supported by the systems that are meant to protect them. One in eight—around 13%—said that they did not feel safe in their local areas, and that rose to 21%, more than a fifth, for those with lived experience of violence. Those are some of the really material challenges that young people talked about. They also talked about the need to be seen and heard, and to be given the opportunity to make change. They felt that their experiences were not listened to, or their worldview understood, by adults in their lives—for example, teachers and the police. They wanted to be treated with empathy, fairness and understanding. The PAC programme gave young people an opportunity to be listened to through its participatory peer-research programme. Crucially, it also transferred power to young people. I can speak more about that, and I am happy to give notes, but I will give others a chance to speak.

Thank you very much. Tanya, do you think that the level of community cohesion among young people has changed over recent years? To what extent do you think it has been influenced by the impact of covid and the lack of community interaction at that time?

I think a huge factor is the digital divide. We have a whole cohort of young people who are now socially isolated, and a lot of funding is put into re-socialising these young people or policing the development of antisocial behaviour when funds could rather be put into supporting community cohesion.

That is concerning. Social media platforms and apps are in the news at the moment, and you are seeing that young people are becoming increasingly isolated because of them. We are talking about specific problems with social media, but are we doing enough to address the wider problems and the impact on younger people?

I think we are learning, aren’t we? One step at a time, some changes are being made, but I think more needs to be done, and I think that there needs to be some bold bravery in the decisions made. Sometimes they are not popular decisions, but they are important decisions. It is the whole concept that you have to be cruel to be kind for the long term, sometimes.

Tanya, don’t be subtle about this. What do you mean by unpopular decisions?

For example, if we say that access to social media for under-13s, under-16s or whatever is a no-go, people are not going to like it and not everyone is going to follow it—but if that became the law, I think it would make a huge difference.

Are you saying that you think legislators need to grasp the nettle and accept that it will be an unpopular decision, but that they have to take drastic action to support young people and help them get over this digital divide and the isolation?

Definitely. It has had a huge impact. Let me bring up a couple of examples locally in our community. There is a young person who is now in his early 20s who was in college during that time and isolated in his home during covid with his mother and aunt. He was very social before, but he is not now. We know from all the research and statistics that social media is like a drug. It is addictive, and young people cannot always say no to something that is there in front of them, constantly feeding. None of us can: we all have our vices, don’t we? In that holiday clubs that we run with our teen volunteers, we have a policy: they sign an agreement with us around behaviour, and their phone gets put away for the day. None of them asks for it. The bold bravery is not about the child being upset; it is about others being upset, because I think digital access is an easy babysitter.

I am sorry to go on about this, but do you think we are listening more to what social media think—or want to think—that children want than to the voices of the children?

I think we are listening to digital feed rather than children.

Lara and Lucy, are the challenges with improving community cohesion that we are hearing about occurring right across the UK, or are there regional differences? Are there things that you see we could be using to tackle them?

There are always going to be different regional needs. As a national charity, we are based in the four nations, so we are based in Northern Ireland as well. We can see there, through 50 years of work, that that has been a challenge. It is something that we have grasped, and wholeheartedly grasped: we are always aiming to get 50:50 if we are trying to do a programme or engage with young people. Really getting the young people to meet one another is the most important thing. Difference is okay, but understanding it is the most important thing. It is really important to quote young people on this, which ties in with your last point. This is from Emmanuel, who is based in London, and this quote was used in our youth index report. The research was gathered in November and December 2024 and was published at the start of 2025, and we have a new one coming out at the end of this month. Emmanuel says, “I’m not at all surprised that 43 per cent of young people find it difficult to meet new people. I think especially after Covid, so many lost their social skills and trust in people. Many people don’t know how or where to make friends outside of school or work”—if they have that. “After dropping out of University, I was very isolated. I wanted to gain life skills and try something new, as I had no idea what I wanted to do next. The Trust’s Explore programme helped me with this and gave me confidence, routine and structure”. I think we can look at that from a national perspective and say that covid was something that affected all of us, but there are certain nuances, when you are looking into localities, about why the confidence of certain young people and their own individual needs within that landscape may be affected as well.

I run an open-access universal youth zone in Oldham. Of the young people who attend, 50% are from minority ethnic backgrounds. The question was asked about what our young people are telling us. They are saying that they feel lonely. They have high levels of anxiety. These are young people who were told not to socialise during the pandemic, and now they are told to socialise, but with a lack of investment in youth services, those opportunities are not there for young people. In the local borough, young people have an opportunity to come to our youth zone; it is somewhere they feel safe and have opportunities. Over the summer last year, there was a lot of misinformation flying around. They are dependent on their phones—some would now call wi-fi a human right. Adults were nervous about letting their children play out or walk to school—they were not going to school, because potentially something could happen to them on the way. We thought the youth zone might have a dip in attendance, but it actually went up, because they felt it was somewhere safe that they could come, meet friends and make new friends. Going back to mobile phone usage, OnSide’s annual “Generation Isolation” report shows that young people are telling us that they do not want to be on their phones as much; they want to socialise. Young people who go to a youth zone tell us that they get a benefit, with 55% of those saying that it is because they have been able to make new friends. Of course, geographically there will be disparity, because communities look very different. In Oldham we are incredibly deprived—we are high on the list for the wrong reasons—but we have such a diverse community. That is something to be celebrated, and young people do celebrate it. It is about having investment to ensure that young people can come together and take up our opportunities.

Lucy and Tanya, I want to come back to you. You are working in very different areas. This session is about community cohesion. It is great to hear that the young people are getting what they need from you. You are talking about them getting off their phones. Lucy, you have a particularly diverse range of young people coming to see you. Are you finding that they are bonding and making friends across cultural, religious and ethnicity lines, or is it that they are coming to your services and staying in their existing friendship groups?

100%—you could bottle Mahdlo youth zone in Oldham, with the mix of young people who come in. Touch wood, but we have never had any issues with that. I think that is about the way our model is set up. When young people come, it is 50p entry, but we would never turn anyone away—a lot of our members do not have 50p. When our young people come in, they are young people for the evening; it doesn’t matter. Everything is under the one roof. Young people can access sports, or, if they do not like that, they can go and try something new. That is the way we have set it up. We have professional youth workers, and our workforce is reflective of the young people who attend. That takes a lot of effort, and we are struggling with recruitment at the moment; I think that is a national issue for youth workers. It is about the way the opportunities are there for young people, as well as the way our youth work team build those relationships and encourage positive relationships. The young people have real ownership. It is there for them, not for us. Our bread and butter is early intervention and prevention. That needs more investment. We need to fund upstream to prevent the need for more targeted services, but actually we work very closely with partners that provide targeted services. As young people come in and access an environment to make friends and try new things, we—as trained professionals—can then spot where there is perhaps a need for mental health support, or where people are seeing things online. We have targeted support built into the offer, so it is easily accessible.

Thank you all for joining us today. My first question is for Tanya. What sort of services do you think are the most beneficial to young people, particularly when it comes to their sense of belonging in their own community?

Services where young people have been not just consulted but empowered to take the lead on having a say about what they want and need—they know their own needs best—are the services that matter. You should focus on bringing people together rather than on the outcomes. If your outcome is, for example, greater mental wellbeing or reducing antisocial behaviour, if you focus on bringing people together, then community cohesion naturally happens and you will meet those outcomes in a more natural way. It definitely needs to be based on empowering young people to lead on the services that they feel are best for them.

That is really interesting, because in my area we have been given money through Pride in Place. We asked those young people who are involved in antisocial behaviour in our local supermarket, “Why do you go and hang out there?” The answer was that they can meet their friends, talk to them and share what they have seen on social media, as there is free wi-fi there, so we know, for a start, how we need to design those new services. Isabella, what role do you think youth services play in reducing antisocial behaviour among young people?

They have an absolutely critical role. In the work that we have done, young people said that they wanted mediated spaces, and places where they feel safe, where they are comfortable, where they are included, where they are not judged and where they can do positive things together, have fun and relax, just as others on this panel have described. That helps them to avoid risky situations. They talked about activities like boxing, football, cycling, cooking and video games, which are all highlighted as being great for keeping young people busy while developing skills. They also, critically, all have mental health benefits. Mental health benefits are incredibly important. One of our PAC teams is based in Haringey in north London and works with the McPin Foundation; they have developed a report, which I can share with you, that talked about the importance of having improving self-esteem, confidence and positive self-identity. All of those things are important, because where people do not have those things, they seek external validation, which makes youth violence seem more attractive. This is where youth clubs are critical, as is investing in that social infrastructure. As you mentioned Pride in Place, the national youth strategy also talks about youth empowerment, and there is an important opportunity here for Government to bring together the Pride in Place call for community governance alongside what is in the strategy around youth empowerment. Bringing those two things together seems like an obvious opportunity to target funding, possibly through devolution settlements, towards youth empowerment and ensuring that young people can make choices about what they need in their communities, as you have spoken about. Through the work of the Peer Action Collective, that is the thing that we have seen that makes the most difference for young people.

We will be coming on to the national youth strategy a bit later. We move on to funding youth services.

Yes—the interesting topic of money. Lucy, can you outline the reduction of funding to youth services that you have seen since 2010 in the UK? Most importantly, what impact has that had on young people and community cohesion more widely? Could you focus on whether any particular groups have been more affected?

The funding cuts since 2010 have affected all young people, but more disproportionately those who were already vulnerable or from disadvantaged backgrounds. Youth work for us is about early intervention and prevention. Youth work is always seen as a nice-to-have rather than a necessity, so it is the easy cut. Local authorities have struggled nationally, and it is always the first thing that goes. We are never going to get ahead of ourselves and put in the investment that young people deserve. For that social return on investment, OnSide has done some research. For every £1 invested, we get £13 back in social return. Someone talked a bit earlier about being bold and brave and funding the tried and tested rather than the new and innovative all the time, so that they have sustained investment in youth services that we don’t see. For young people who were already vulnerable or dealing with the cost of living and the covid impact, it has just become further entrenched.

Do you have any particular comments on the impact that the cuts have had on cohesion in communities?

I think it is more that young people have not got the opportunity to come together. Young people tell us that they are isolated and lonely. A lot are spending a lot of time at home in their bedrooms and not accessing. Those that want to access have not got places where they feel it is safe to go, or opportunities that are affordable and easily accessible, which young people want. It’s about consultation again. The youth voice is really important. Also, to the point around antisocial behaviour, young people do gather. We were asked to go to an area outside a local Tesco where we were told that a huge number of young people were gathering and displaying antisocial behaviour, but they weren’t. There were just a lot of them. They had access to the toilet and wi-fi. As youth workers, with a small part of the investment we were able to work with those young people to find out what they want, so that we put money in the right places for what they want to do, whereas the police might just move the problem on.

Looking at the wider funding picture, a lot of funding traditionally came from local government, but I know now you also get funding from grant applications. I know OnSide work with local organisations as well to try to get funding. How is the picture looking for that at the moment, in terms of getting funding from other sources for youth facilities like yours?

In terms of that initial injection of investment to build new youth zones, for instance, we are about to open another six youth zones across the country this year. The ongoing challenge is sustainability. In Oldham, local businesses and philanthropists are fully invested in our young people. Oldham council are fully invested in the youth zone and our young people. The real challenge is the trusts and grants. Everyone is competing for the pound. Probably a question for later on is around how people bid for money. You are bidding against each other all the time. You are constantly competing for the money rather than, from a local point of view, coming together to make the most impact for the young people of Oldham, rather than just the individual organisations.

That is really helpful; thank you. Lara, how should responsibilities for funding, design and delivering youth services be shared between central and local government? In your experience, how well do different Government Departments such as the Department for Education and DCMS liaise on youth services?

That is a great question. Going back to the first part of it, it is really interesting at this point in time to be talking about that because we are in a transition time, going from shared prosperity funding to local growth funding. That is really important when you are looking at provision for communities, especially within the youth sector. Echoing points made previously, it needs to be consistent and sustained, and people really need clarity. That is the point that would give so much confidence, not only to the young people who are receiving the services, but to those providing them as well. In the transition time that we are sitting in at the moment, there are question marks over envelopes that are being delivered for local growth funds and over the split between capital and revenue. Obviously, we know it is important that there is somewhere to be, but we also need to provide services through the revenue funding. I think consistency is probably the most important thing that I would say to that point. In terms of what has been done previously and collaboration, I am looking forward to what is going to come out of the youth strategy, I am looking forward to cross-departmental working on this and I am looking forward to youth hubs. I am looking forward to young people seeing the benefits of cross-departmental working. We can only improve, moving forward.

That is really helpful; thank you very much.

We will now move on to the national youth strategy.

We have talked a bit about the national youth strategy and some opportunities there. Isabella, it would be good to get into the detail of how well it will address people’s health, wellbeing and social cohesion.

I think it might be better if I confer with my colleagues at the Young Foundation and send you a more detailed note. We have a particular set of knowledge around the area in the national youth strategy that talks about sharing power with young people, which is one of its key strands. We know from the work that we have done that that will translate into meaningful change for young people in respect to cohesion and all the different domains that are related to it that you have just shared. In the PAC programme, we saw young people working with regional stakeholders, including police and crime commissioners, violence reduction units, combined authorities, universities and rail providers—a huge range of local providers, but also national providers. People talked about being inspired by younger people’s confidence and commitment to change. Also, the perceptions of young people’s contributions have changed through being involved in that programme. It also led to lots of different kinds of interventions, and changes happening in local areas. I have a huge a list of them—our Gateshead team working with their local council to build a directory of positive activities; our Bradford team developing a national rail campaign to support young people to feel safer travelling; our Bradford team working to deliver a specialist agency to provide mental health support in schools. The list goes on. It fundamentally comes down to bringing the funding within communities and local empowerment together. That is the thing that makes the difference.

Do you think there was enough engagement from the Government with you and the sorts of stakeholders you talked about, in developing the strategy? Was that engagement meaningful enough?

I admit that we were not so involved in the development of the strategy, so I am afraid I am not well placed to answer that question—perhaps others could answer it.

I open it up to anyone else.

In terms of young people’s involvement and having them as stakeholders, I think it was broadly positive. We have not had a youth strategy for nearly two decades, so it is incredibly welcome. We would like to see ongoing meaningful conversations with young people, and them being allowed to co-design. The most important next steps are making that youth strategy come to life, delivering on what we say that we will deliver, having clear accountability and making sure young people can hold people to account and that their voice continues. Within the 10-year span, we have outlined where the funding will come from for a number of years, but at the moment it is unclear how long-term investment is going to continue.

I can come in on that. They did a really good job of the Deliver You survey, which went out to thousands of young people across England. We were keen to put that out on our social media and to put it on the caseloads of our youth delivery leads, so that there was that genuine engagement of the young person involved in this work. Sustaining that is really important. We are part of the Back Youth Alliance on the side, as well, so we were contributing as much as possible throughout the process of writing the strategy, but I think that the sustainability piece is really important as well. Government are doing their best. We are working at the minute with the Youth Advisory Group that is working with the Irish Government, who have had their strategy in place since 2023. I think that sharing those tips, working together across nations and—especially as we are talking about community cohesion—young people from different nations coming together to talk about their own lived experiences, is a really positive thing. I am optimistic.

What is not in the strategy that should be in there?

That is a difficult question, isn’t it?

It flips it around, really. Is there stuff that we are missing?

For me personally, we are in the very embryonic stages of the strategy. That is where we are sitting at the moment, so I would not want to be too critical about what is missing. What I can see is a very positive strategy, moving forward. The real tenets to understand are: somewhere to be, somewhere to go, someone to talk to. The trusted adult piece was missing, and that has been inserted, definitely. Building on the work of good organisations in a collaborative way, like we do as the youth sector, can only be a positive thing. I don’t want to talk about gaps at the moment because I don’t know them, unfortunately.

That is fair enough; I got very excited.

I was just going to add to that. The strategy looks good and we will see how effective it is when it is truly put into practice. One of the important things to consider in that is a hyper-local involvement: making sure that resident-led decisions are made on what happens, and meaningful engagement. The youth strategy mentions youth voice, whereas we have youth ownership. There is a difference between asking a young person what colour to paint a wall in the new community hub versus giving them the opportunity be a youth volunteer and even to mentor the next, younger generation. How it is put into practice will evidence how good this strategy is.

That is helpful. I will link it with the questions that David was asking about the money and the funding. Is sufficient funding allocated to the strategy, from what you have seen so far, and do you think that it is targeted in the right areas?

Residents must have a say. We have a fantastic local neighbourhood board—they were the town boards; now they are the neighbourhood boards and they are really good—but they are not made up of residents. If you look at us, as an ex-Big Local area, I lead a committee of residents who have been supported to feel empowered to make decisions on how to spend £1 million over 10 years, and that has activated securing the levelling-up round 2 funding for us to now build a community hub. It is residents who have made that happen, not professionals or councillors. So, I think that it has to be at a hyper-local level—and sustainable, as my colleagues said earlier. It is all good and well to invest in a community hub, but it has to be sustainable. If you have invested in capital, you have to then invest in the revenue and ensure that staff are being funded to facilitate what needs to happen in the future.

Is that your view, Lucy? Do you think that it is the right level of funding, or sufficient?

It is too early to tell. For me, the important thing is that it does not get pigeonholed too much, so that we can make decisions locally around what is best for the communities that we work with, and so that the funding does not become diluted. I think that will give us the opportunity—as was just said—to make sure it is really localised. It is also important that there is flex within that, so that we are not carrying on for 10 years down the same path if it is not working—if something is not working, we can do something different.

Before I hand over to Rachel, who has some other questions, I want to explore the idea of engaging with young people. When I go to schools in Luton North, I tell the students that they are my boss, because ultimately they are. Whether it is Pride in Place funding, or their aims and hopes for the future, I always want to hear from them. My fellow Luton MP, Rachel Hopkins, and I did that with the national youth strategy; we had a proper engagement session. But things like that are extraordinary; they do not happen day to day in Government, and they certainly do not happen in every policy area. If they did, and we listened to young people and properly engaged with them, I feel that we would get things right first time round. Is that something you would like to see spread into other policy areas, so that we are asking young people not just what they want for young people, but what they want for society as a whole?

Absolutely, 100%. Just speaking from our experience as a charity, we have an amazing London youth voice group. When the new Administration came in, we went to the Department for Education. We walked around the Department and we sat in Bridget Phillipson’s offices, which was wonderful, and a few people were asking questions of the Department. At that point, I don’t think civil servants had seen that that often, and it is really important that they see more of it. So, yes, I agree with you 100%: across Departments, young people need to be getting engaged. It is also about giving the young person that knowledge base, and about them knowing how democracy actually works and understanding that piece, which also ties in to community cohesion. So it is fundamental to everything we are talking about that this is a national conversation and a multi-generational conversation.

Does anyone else have anything to add?

Yes, we would strongly agree with that. The success of the PAC programme demonstrates the power of investing in youth leadership, voice and engagement, and you can see the difference it is making in lots of local areas. But it does need investment; as you will have found yourself, it requires time and care to do community-powered policymaking well, so we would strongly advocate ringfencing funding for it. Again, that could potentially happen through things like the devolution settlements. We talk about ringfencing 1% of the £5 billion of new devolution investment in community research and involvement in local policymaking. It is that combination of community research and working with young people to translate it into actions in their local areas, that makes a difference.

Some of the best submissions for ideas for what to do with Pride in Place funding have come from young people. That was facilitated by young people as well, and we had primary school children with secondary school children as facilitators. It was wonderful to see; it was really good. I encourage anybody to do that. If you feel at all cynical about life, go and listen to young people, because they don’t ask for ideas for themselves, but for their entire community.

I have been listening to what you have said, and I wanted to ask about safe spaces. Rachel talked about young people going to supermarkets, and Tanya said something about that. We talk about antisocial behaviour in lots of instances; in towns, we see groups of kids gathering in places, and we label it antisocial behaviour. But are they actually creating their own safe spaces because we are failing to do it for them?

They definitely are creating their own safe spaces, because there are often no spaces for them. Young people are often stereotyped as being antisocial. When I first joined Heart of Sidley in 2019, I went to a multi-stakeholder meeting about antisocial behaviour. One of the issues that was raised was young people hanging out on the green near the pub. I asked, “Why is that a problem? If I were hanging out on the green near the pub with a few of my friends, you would be hoping that I would come in to spend some money in your shop or your pub.” We do need to change how young people are seen. Often, antisocial behaviour stems from young people not being seen as human, as part of the community and as the next generation of leaders, and being pushed aside. They definitely need safe spaces. We are building our Sidley hub, and we have engaged with young people throughout the process to ensure that they have a say. When we said, “Do you want a youth club? What do you want?”, they said, “We just want a space to hang out with our friends and do what we want to do.” They just want a safe space. As has been said, they want wi-fi and they want to be able to do their own thing. Creating those safe spaces also builds trust. They find people they can trust in those safe spaces.

Within the national youth strategy, they have identified the need for a named police officer who is attached to local antisocial behaviour. That has to be done in partnership with young people because we would just be moving the problem on. It is like my point earlier: rather than actually working with those young people to find out why they congregate there and what they would like, there is the risk that you just want to move young people because local people are saying that they are causing antisocial behaviour. Youth workers are trained to spot for safeguarding. They might be gathering there for specific reasons that might not first be uncovered.

I was interested about the co-designing of what happens, and in it being resident-led and led by young people. Do we find any difference between what girls and boys are telling us they want and need? Is that coming out differently if we meet and talk with them separately or together?

When I think about the big themes that have come through our programme of work for PAC, it is about safety, which is a really big thing. That means different things for young men and young women. I am sure colleagues on the panel will be close to the ground and what that looks like on a day-to-day basis. That has come through throughout the work, as well as mental health intervention and support. That feels different for young men and young women. I will invite others to come in further.

I can give three stats on what you have said there. We are looking specifically at young people who are not in education, work or training. Looking at that piece is quite interesting: 59% of women said yes to the statement “The longer I am unemployed, the worse I feel about myself”; among males it was 48%. Loss of confidence while out of work affected 51% of women and 39% of males. There is a bit of a difference there. Mental health problems during unemployment were reported by 32% of women and 29% of males. Those are not that far apart. You can see that there is a little more of a confidence piece with young men when talking about being out of work, but it is a confidence piece. Essentially, that leads to all the negative outcomes that we are talking about, which can become a problem for community cohesion.

We see at our junior youth club of eight to 12-year-olds that the gender split is near 50:50. As soon as young females hit 13 or 14, that is where the drop-out is. That will be across the youth sector. We have done a lot of work with girls. We have a girls-only session on a Saturday afternoon. One reason is that Oldham is very diverse, with a high Muslim population who want a girls-only space. We regularly see 90 females attending. They do so because it is led by an all-female team and only females allowed. They feel they can access sport or the gym and feel safe. We have started to pilot a female-only golden thread through our other provision, so that at any point during an open-access youth evening there is always something female-only. We have already seen a huge increase in female participation since August. We have listened to girls and seen that they want a safe space just for them. One of the main reasons is the different maturity levels for boys and girls at that age. That is what they are telling us.

Thank you—that is really helpful.

I have two quick questions before we end this session. Lucy, you mentioned the difficulty of getting youth workers. Do we have any statistics on the national shortage of youth workers, Lara or Isabella?

Unfortunately, I don’t. I can look at that and write to you about it, but that is not our specialisation.

I don’t either.

If you could follow that up, that would be fantastic. Thank you. Secondly, I want to ask every single one of you what your key priority—your key ask of the Government—is.

I would say that community cohesion is the result of focusing on community priorities and community working. That means that it is better to focus on the priorities of the community itself than on building cohesion, as community cohesion builds naturally from giving local people the opportunity to make their own choices and changes in their neighbourhood. Again, I would say that it is that hyper-local focus.

I am going to repeat myself and say, “Continuous and sustained funding.” It is really important to ask that of Government. As a sector, we need to have confidence and therefore to instil confidence in the young people we serve. Obviously, the cultural competency piece is really important, too—the Government’s understanding, the sector’s understanding and the young person’s understanding.

Echoing Tanya to some extent, I would say that we need to invest in social infrastructure with young people, in consultation with them, to ensure effective use of the money in facilities and services that young people will use and want in their communities.

Long-term investment is not a nice-to-have, but a necessity. We also need support with the workforce. The Government should particularly raise the profile of youth work on a big scale to support with that workforce piece.

I am going to be really cheeky. We are also doing work on the manosphere and online misogyny and hate. Tanya and Lucy, have you seen any evidence that the manosphere is having an impact on the journeys of the young people you are working with or beginning to work with?

Sorry, but could you say that again?

We are doing a separate piece of work on the manosphere and how it is impacting how young men and women, and young boys and girls, interact and live their lives. What impact are you seeing? Is there anything that is working, in terms of undoing some of that harm, when you work with young people?

The challenge for other providers in providing female-only spaces or activities—I think I am on the right lines—is that they will say, “Oh, not a lot of females turn up. A lot of boys are wanting to go on and do this activity,” so they are pulling that out rather than using it. Actually, it is a gift for a youth worker to have that conversation around why female spaces are important.

It was more about how we support and, I guess, have any interventions that are needed for any young boys and young men who are perhaps seeing and being subjected to content that is harmful, that is violent and that is misogynistic. It is about how you work and what support you would need to work with those young people in the best way possible for them. It has to be receptive to them too, because it is really important that the young people are actually receptive.

It is really important for young boys to have mentors. The mentoring piece is really important for us as an organisation. It is something that we are looking into at the King’s Trust but, just generally, the trusted adult piece in the strategy highlights that. We want to be what we see as a society, so young men need men to support them. That is just common sense. We are all supposed to be trusted adults in this room, and it is common sense that young men need good male role models and mentors. Not just men, maybe: moving on through their journey, it might be about their relationships with women. It depends on where that young person is in that place.

Lara, you said that you were hopefully going to get us information about the shortage of youth workers. It would be really good to see whether there is a shortage of male youth workers, and a disparity there, if you are talking about good role models and mentors.

That would be really interesting, yes.

Thank you very much for your time and for sharing your expertise and experience with us.   Witnesses: Debbie Cook, Ali Oliver and Ruth Hollis.

We are now moving on to the role of sport, which many of us on the Committee are incredibly excited about, although some of us are sportier than others—currently. We have had a lot of written evidence from different sporting organisations about community cohesion. For people who are not in the sporting or community cohesion space, that might be surprising, but for many of us it is not surprising at all. I am going to hand over immediately to one of our sportier members: Kim.

Sport plays a significant role. I am here representing English Football League in the Community, which is the EFL’s charitable arm. We work with the 72 football club charities that are linked to every English football club in England and Wales. Those football club charities deliver a number of programmes. Many of them span sport, but they use the power of football. They will deliver health programmes, programmes in school and youth engagement. Today, I will talk about the community cohesion programmes that they are running. Their contribution, through the power of football, is bringing people together around a common passion and an interest rarely seen elsewhere. I have seen personally, as an ex-football club chief executive, that you do not need to be a football fan to engage with your local football club and its charity, because there is a general acceptance that, whether you are a fan or not, you understand the passion. Because of that, the football club charities can be open, accessible spaces where people can go and where there is no stigma attached to engaging and undertaking various activities. We feel that our football club charities are particularly able to contribute here, because we have 49 million people who live within 15 miles of an EFL club, and so they are actively engaged with those clubs. Ninety-six per cent of England’s most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods live within 10 miles of an EFL club, so we are uniquely positioned: we are that trusted brand and we foster intercultural understanding. Our football clubs and, from what I have seen personally, our football club charities deliver such a diverse range of programmes and projects. They deliver an approach in which they have listened to their community, so it is not one size fits all. They wrap their arms around different communities and around families, and usually they are able to offer something for everyone.

We have probably all written “significant” next to the role that sport can play, and I think it does have a very significant role. I will use sport and physical activity interchangeably. On the work of Spirit of 2012, while we were born of the legacy of London 2012, it has very much been focused on community activations, working in communities and reaching the least active, so we have taken the opposite slant, I guess, to many legacy programmes that try to get big numbers through traditional sports. We looked at how we can go out into communities. I say “we” because we work through delivery partners—we are a funder. One of the things we need to think about with sport is the whole ecosystem around it. It is not just what happens on the pitch or in the stadia, and it is not just the people playing; there is a whole social and community infrastructure around sport. We have a workforce, significant numbers of volunteers and families, and work with all those can lead to greater social cohesion. Essentially, we are giving people the opportunity to bond over something they enjoy, so sport is brilliant. Sport is not the only thing; we would also say arts and culture or volunteering. Anything that gets people together is great for social cohesion, because it is about social mixing. Belong has done some brilliant work, following up from its Beyond Us and Them research during covid. It did a piece of work with us called Radical Kindness, about bringing people across difference together, with that sense of socially mixing and how we create the spaces that are trusting, supportive and can bring people together to develop understanding, empathy and, at the end of the day, the friendships and bonds that lead to greater social cohesion. We have evaluated some of our physical activity interventions—we did a big programme with the Scottish Government called Changing Lives, or Get Out Get Active, which was our largest physical activity intervention. When we have asked people their motivation for coming and staying, it has been at least as much about the social elements as about the physical activity elements. I think we need to harness that whole infrastructure to build that kind of bridging capital and bring people together. As well as funding projects, Belong has done some great work to codify the role of sport—again, that is available online and I can point to it—around the power of sport with others. I think we can look at the whole system, look at the social mixing and look at the space around sport.

Thank you, Kim. I represent a charity called the Youth Sport Trust, as you say. Its mission is to build brighter futures through the power of play and sport. We know that part of our mission is to get more young people to enjoy, fall in love with or stay in love with moving—I believe that children are born in love with moving and we kick it out of them. It is about that, but also—to take your second point first, Kim—about performance, participation and the intentional use of sport as a vehicle to drive social change. I think that that is often completely missed. We talk about the performance end, we talk about grassroots and getting the nation more active, and about giving people, hopefully, the motivation and understanding of how to stay active for a healthy and fulfilling life—but the bit in the middle that we do a lot of, thanks to people like Ruth and Spirit of 2012, is to raise funds to do targeted interventionist work through the context of play and sport. Spirit of 2012 funded us to deliver a Breaking Boundaries project, which was inspired by the nation hosting the cricket world cup and cricket being, potentially, a sport that has the power to unite. Lots of people of different heritage in this country are passionate about cricket. It started there; it ended up multi-sport. But the whole idea of the project was to intentionally use cricket as a vehicle and the places where cricket was played—to come back to Debbie’s point, that kind of neutral territory—to bring people together to have fun, enjoy, learn and understand about each other. That would be my first point. We may well have the opportunity to come back to that later. On the point about children and young people, sport plays a fundamental role in developing attitudes, beliefs and values, which then underpin children’s character and how they view the world. We do not need to get into overly interventionist work, but one of the things that we have always been passionate about in physical education is that it is a subject that uses the physical domain but develops the physical, social, emotional and cognitive aspects of a child. Therein is a really important point: sport is a brilliant safe space to help children explore attitudes, perceptions and values, and also to build some of those competencies, like leadership and resilience, which are important in our world for being able to work alongside others and live harmoniously. It is about genuinely targeted projects and programmes, where we are working with cohorts and communities in a very deliberate way to try to create cohesion, but the way in which we educate children in and through the physical can also develop attitudes and values and behaviours that stand us in good stead for the future.

I will talk initially about a programme we ran a few years ago. Unfortunately, the funding ceased; I am sure we will come on to talk about that. We ran a programme across 10 of our football club charities called Communities United. That brought together families, through those 10 charities; it focused largely on their culture, they did fun activities and heritage activities together, and then they worked on a social action project together. It was a real journey of discovery. Just short of 260 people engaged in this programme. We got some really positive outcomes from that, which were around the feeling of increased belonging and a broader understanding of one another’s culture. As I say, that programme was discontinued, and that is one of the challenges that we face. We saw a 30% increase in the positive feeling around trust, social capital, social cohesion. That is one project we could talk about. Leyton Orient football club runs a programme called Connects FC. I have sat in on one of those gatherings. It is incredibly fun, but also really powerful, when we see the use of sport to bring people together socially. Connects FC brings together the Punjabi, the Jewish, the LGBTQ community and others, all around a table. It might start with their love of Leyton Orient football club, but actually the areas of discovery that they then chat through and work through are really building those lasting connections and really positive behaviours and, as was said earlier, those future leaders.

Obviously, we have a lot of diversity across the 72 football club charities. Generally, those football club charities are well connected in their local authorities. Many of them work with their local authorities to listen to specific community needs, to engage with specific marginalised communities and listen to what they need and deliver. They will be receiving Government funding to run specific programmes, and that will vary across the country. Are they working directly with Government? I think what they are doing is receiving small pots of Government funding for targeted initiatives, but we are not seeing that being sustained. It is a challenge. For our charity network, for example, around community cohesion, if we talk specifically about football and we take the summer riots of 2024, football behind the scenes was asked to engage after the event to bring communities together and start a clear-up to help that community heal. We would like to continue with those programmes that we know are successful and have really positive outcomes so that we do not need to lean on football when we start to see those problems escalate.

As a funder, we invested £21.1 million in projects that bring people together and £13.3 million in activity projects, or projects that particularly use sport and physical activity. We are really proud that we have reached, with regular participants, over 104,000 across the UK and 64,000 volunteers. It is really about how we have funded as much as what we have funded. Our funding model was based around outcomes with a focus on social outcomes rather than mechanisms. We have funded some sport and physical activity programmes, but social cohesion was one of the three primary outcomes that we were funding. We were less interested in the mechanism, although sport was a very effective and important one, but looking much more at the kind of outcome. We focused on flexibility—Ali talked a little bit about that—and on testing new approaches and gathering learning. Breaking Boundaries was the biggest specific physical activity and social cohesion programme that we funded. It was £1.8 million over three and a half years in five locations. I will let Ali speak to some of the detail. It was interesting that we started it from the premise that cricket was a really good vehicle to bring people together, particularly young people, and develop empathy, understanding and cross-working. It was, but we needed to shift, and that was through listening and building flexibility in.

It became multi-sport. Part of that was because just focusing on cricket-related activities during covid was quite hard on Zoom, but it was also that the young people did not just want to do cricket. Coming back to the point from the previous panel about really listening to young people and what they want, allowing them to have agency over what is delivered and how it is delivered is important. It is something that the Youth Sport Trust and Sporting Equals, who delivered it, did brilliantly. Embedded in it was a development programme for young people, so it wasn’t just doing the sport. There was a lot of the education programme around empathy and understanding, and they also shifted at the time into multi-sport, focused very much more on developing partnerships between organisations. That is something we often miss in community cohesion. It is important to focus on individuals, but developing partnerships between the trusted organisations that individuals go to is important. That kind of bridging work is important. We have done lots of work with the Scottish Government through the Changing Lives through Sport and Physical Activity programme. For example, there was a partnership between jogscotland and Scottish Action for Mental Health, and work with Sporting Memories around football, bringing older members of the community together to talk about the heritage and memories around sport. We have also used major events. Obviously, sport is not just the playing and participating. We bring a lot of major events into the UK, so we have used lots of major events to build community programmes, for example around the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth games.

I will not repeat what has already been said about Breaking Boundaries, but I want to make one point about it: it was about organisations coming together. There is a really important point about community cohesion: no one can do it on their own. It is about bringing together a range of trusted organisations. I will give you an example of how this was structured. We worked with Sporting Equals, which some of you will know is a trusted organisation supporting people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds to feel a sense of belonging in sport. They helped with community connectors, who were community leaders, at a really local level, who were already trusted, understood and known to be part of the way we messaged what the Breaking Boundaries programme was about and to open doors and so on. Then StreetGames supported an apprenticeship programme with community co-ordinators, who were young people who took on apprenticeships in each of the five cities that Ruth mentioned, and in turn they recruited young people who were community champions. They were volunteers who were developing themselves, as Ruth said, but playing the role of peer leaders, inspiring their peers to get active. Building on that, we were able to create something called Unified Action. To pick up on your point about funding, that was funded by MHCLG, and that allowed us to take this concept—young leaders having a voice, being empowered and then driving the change that they want in their community—further forward. This was in the same five cities; we just built it straight out of Breaking Boundaries. Then, with the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, a grant-giving body, we were able to turn that into Unified Action for sports governance, whereby we placed young interns into sport governing bodies, on their boards, to help their boards think about how they could tackle issues like community cohesion more effectively. I will mention a final two. Ruth mentioned the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth games. Off the back of the work that Ruth helped us get going, we ran Birmingham Connect, which was a school-twinning project for different neighbourhoods across Birmingham. It gave young people who do not mix, particularly those from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, the opportunity to mix. That was supported by Team England, and then the Birmingham organising committee allowed us to do Commonwealth Connections, which was a school-twinning project. Sixty schools across Birmingham were linked with different Commonwealth countries. Again, it was about building a sense of understanding, mutual respect and responsibility among people from different nations and cultural backgrounds, and it was all done through sport. Your second question was about branding. Again, I heard it discussed because I was just observing the last session. I don’t think young people give too much thought to that. There are obvious things about the local football club that mean they have a resonance, but often it does not matter who funds the project, because we ask the young people what they want to call it and they give it their own name. That is because part of community cohesion is that collective identity—that sense that we are all in this together and we all unite—and what better way to achieve it than to allow young people to give it a name or brand?

We have two and a half weeks to go, which is sad, and happy because we were always set up to close. We were set up as a spend-out trust by the National Lottery Community Fund, so closing is not a surprise to us; it was planned for. We have spent our £47 million endowment and are now closing, actually very happily and contentedly, so that’s good. In terms of the key lessons, looking back to when we were set up and developed the theory of change in 2013, it was really important for us to work with stakeholders to get under the skin of the impact our funding could have. The theory of change that we developed all that time ago, looking at the pathways for events, sport, culture and volunteering and how they can help communities, has stood the test of time and has enabled us to measure very effectively the social impact of the work we have funded. One of the key lessons for me is that we need to build funding and programmatic infrastructure around a theory of change so that you know what you are aiming for, you know what change you want to see, and you can start to get under the skin of how and why it has developed. Being independent, we were really lucky that we could fund things over the long term and very flexibly—that was really important. Breaking Boundaries was three and a half years, and our programme to engage the very least active was eight and a half years. We need long-term funding. We also need development funding. If we are going to ask grantees and delivery organisations to co-produce—we heard about co-production in the previous panel—and deliver in partnership, funders need to step up, fund that and help them get that off the ground to make it really effective. We need to use development funding properly over the long term, and we expect people to have sustained engagement in activities. We see one-offs all the time, but they will not deliver the social outcomes you want, like social cohesion. For our projects, we always aim for people to have at least weekly or fortnightly engagement for at least three to six months so that they can really develop those bonds. I know we are talking about sport, but thinking more cross-sectorally and in a more place-based way is important. Sport is important, but it is not the only thing people do to come together, so we need to think about volunteering and arts and culture. Bradford city of culture has just concluded, and 70% of people said they felt more connected to people in their community. Seven in 10 said they felt prouder of living in Bradford. There were sporting elements to that too, so it is important to think about how we bring all that together. Finally, one of the best things we have done as we have come up to close is to open up all our evidence and archives to expert bodies. We have said, “Come and have a look at it. Test it and see whether it is any good, and then make things that will stand the test of time.” We have had a fantastic partnership with Belong, to whom we have opened up all our evidence, and they have created a brilliant toolkit on using sport for social cohesion, which is built not just on us but on other evidence too and real-life practice. Funders and organisations should open up their evidence more so that we do not just have lovely evaluation reports sitting on a server, never looked at again. That is really critical in moving this forward.

I will be, but I have a question about data—I love a bit of data. Ruth and Ali, you talked about the social cohesion outcomes of these projects in different spaces. How are you measuring that? What looks like success?

Ruth has just referred to the theory of change. For the Breaking Boundaries project, there was a very clear idea, “This is the journey we are trying to go on.” Through the Spirit of 2012 partnership, Ruth appointed an independent evaluator, so we had Wavehill looking at this from the word go. We were able to identify some of the things that Debbie has already talked about: how young people were reporting their sense of belonging, how much more they were participating with young people they would not normally participate with, and how a community was taking part in physical activity with other communities more than it was before. We have a lot of that, and I am sure Ruth will talk through a bit more of the detail. There is one thing that I wanted to mention today. I didn’t know whether to save it to the end, if you would allow us to say something after the last question. I don’t believe there is—feel free to tell me otherwise—a clear national shared understanding of how we measure community cohesion. We adopted something, and that meant that all of Ruth’s work had the same framework, but when we work with other organisations, they have different ones. I don’t think that is helpful in truly being able to evaluate what really works against things that are less effective.

I agree. I don’t think there is a shared measure.

Do you think it would be helpful if there were?

I think it would be fantastically helpful. Most of our projects have looked at things like trust, belonging and friendships with people in different groups. One of the things that is critically important in getting robust data is supporting delivery organisations to be able to collect it, and then we have to use it. We have had lots of experience with delivery organisations, which are frankly quite nervous of asking people what they think are sensitive questions about their communities and how they feel. Nobody rocking up to a sports session wants to tick the box to say, “I don’t have friends from other groups”, so supporting those delivery organisations to be able to collect that data empathetically at the right time is really important. And if we are going to collect the data, we have to use it. It is not good enough for organisations to be expected to collect it just for the funder. That has shifted in funding practice, but we need to see much more of that.

That brings us on to funding.

It is really inspiring to be joined by three inspirational women in the field of sport. I am probably the second most enthusiastic person about sport on this Committee, because nobody could be more enthusiastic than Kim. I am delighted to follow in her footsteps by chairing the all-party parliamentary group for sport and physical activity, so I have met some of you before. Ali, I will come to you first. Who do you think are the main funders of community sports initiatives? We have heard about how a lot of this funding comes and goes, but who are the main funders of community sport, and through what mechanisms are these initiatives generally funded?

Across the home countries, the sports councils tend to be the prime funders of community sport alongside local authorities. The two work hand in glove, so that is a fairly well-trodden path. Obviously, there is a huge amount of participant funding, with people funding themselves to take part either as club members or through pay-and-play opportunities. We have seen Government Departments invest. I have mentioned MHCLG, and we have benefited from Department of Health and Social Care funding, DFE funding and Department for Transport funding. On that point, it has always felt quite un-co-ordinated, so we have needed to knock on lots of doors to convince people that we can deliver something that aligns with a Government Department’s objective. I certainly have not felt for a really long time any sort of cross-Government consideration of how sport can be developed to deliver on multiple agendas. I mentioned the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, and quite a lot of trusts and foundations support us. At the moment, we are running a big programme with the Wimbledon Foundation called Set for Success, which is a life skills and employability programme. Quite brilliantly, a bit like Debbie talked about in one of her projects, it has a social action element in which the young people, once they have all been trained, get to pick a topic. So often they pick community cohesion-type projects. They want to build the community that they would like to live in. Finally, I will mention major events. Spirit of 2012 is an example of that, but I have talked about the Birmingham Commonwealth games as well. It is sort of tiered down, but mainly the sports councils, with local authority investment, are the main funders from my experience.

What is really positive is that both Sport England and the National Lottery Community Fund have missions around social cohesion, so they are now explicitly funding social cohesion. One of the things we have to watch for is where there might be gaps in funding. Is it community or is it sport? Is it sport or is it movement and physical activity? We can unwittingly create gaps that some projects fall down.

Have you seen patterns emerge in recent years, in terms of funding community sport?

I was going to mention something, and I will lose my job if I don’t.

Please do.

Obviously, the National Lottery is a huge investor. I talked about the sports councils, and of course Sport England is the distributor of funds for sport, but I needed to make sure that one was mentioned. We have certainly seen more and more organisations, whether they be corporate businesses or the All England Lawn Tennis Club or the Wimbledon Foundation, wanting to fill gaps and see the power of sport truly understood by people. We are seeing more of that. We have a partnership with the London Marathon Foundation in four boroughs across London, and we talk regularly to the Wembley Stadium Foundation who do a lot of good, funded work in and around their local borough and more widely.

Many of us, as constituency MPs, have seen the work though the Premier League, the English Football League and so on. Is it fair to say that the funding model has become more fragmented and could it, or should it, be made simpler?

The football club charity landscape takes its funding from numerous sources, the Premier League being one of them. The football clubs themselves fund activities, and there will also be some Government funding and some from other sports bodies. They are also generating their own commercial partnerships. Where there could be an improvement, and you talked a little about this on the previous panel, is in better join-up across the sectors. If, for example, a body is investing in a programme where south Asian women are coming to play football, or another sport—we have such programmes in our football clubs now—there will be work going on around mental health, and maybe around financial management and connecting with the wider family, but we do not see a central join-up for that money to be better spent and have a broader impact.

There are pros and cons. For a charity, the fact that it is quite fragmented means there are lots of places we can go, which is quite helpful. But the fact it is fragmented means it is not strategic. There is a lot of time and energy wasted trying to bring the resources together to do good work that has a solid evidence base and can help the nation with some of the challenges it is facing. An example is the lack of a national strategy for physical activity—for movement or sport. There is not one, but if there were, I would hate to think it would be a DCMS-only strategy. We need a Government strategy that leans into all the various parts of society where sport can make a difference.

That is really interesting. Do you think there has been sufficient funding for sports programmes that are focused on community cohesion?

I suspect that people working in communities, as we heard from the previous panel, would say there is never enough money for that kind of community engagement. It is about thinking about local infrastructure and the places where people go. I think there is good funding for sport locally, but I will defer to my colleagues if they do not think there is. Lots of young people will access sport through youth clubs and youth centres. We need to think more broadly about funding for the social and civic infrastructure that sport is part of and sits alongside very well. As well as just our sporting infrastructure, how do we make places where people can undertake sport and physical activity and be active in the broadest sense?

This question is about football clubs, Debbie, but I think it goes for other sports too. Is there more that wealthy clubs and players could be doing to support grassroots sport?

I would not want to comment, because that is quite a generalisation around wealthy clubs and players. It is a really broad topic. There will be numerous ongoing projects, which we do not know about, that are being funded by players and clubs. A huge amount of work is being undertaken by football club charities to channel funds locally, and we need to listen and make sure that we maximise the use of those funds. We would like the funding that is available to be longer-term. We would like the organisations that we are representing today—that are listening to their communities, and that are talking and understanding what young people and marginalised communities need—to have longer-term funding to enable them to have a lasting impact. We are often seeing some really great work. In this community cohesion space, we know that measuring the impact of that work can sometimes take longer because the challenges are more complex and more difficult to understand. We talked about data earlier, and to pick up that point around understanding impact, we measure annually the impact of the work of our 72 football club charities. We have an impact report, which I would love to send you, showing the vast number of people, 1.1 million, we are engaging and the £1.24 billion-worth of social value. A common approach to measuring that across community cohesion would be really useful. I think our organisation is showing a great model. What we do is try to build capacity with those 72 football club charities. We have developed a monitoring, evaluation and learning toolkit so that they can all measure the impact of their work, so that we can tell that story and show the return on investment, which at the moment is £11 for every £1 invested across our programmes.

Ali mentioned that one of the ways that we can stimulate physical activity and sport investment in communities is through major events. I think we have a real opportunity with Euro 2028 coming to the UK and the Republic of Ireland. It happens to be in the year of the 80th anniversary of Windrush, and I think there is a significant opportunity for that legacy programme, and the impact programme built around it, to do some significant work on social cohesion through football.

On fragmentation and my first point in answer to Kim’s question, it feels to me that sport for social good is not recognised as something to invest in. We invest in organisations that are able to do it, but we do not set out to try to do that. I am on the board of the Sport for Development Coalition, which is lucky to be a Sport England system partner. It is a tiny organisation of three people, but it has 400 grassroots organisations in communities that would not consider themselves to be sports clubs—they are community clubs, but sport is how they work in that community. The funding for that feels to me not to be thought through and not clear. It is brilliant that the football clubs and foundations are all doing this work, but it is out of their own good will rather than a strategic intent to try to drive this sort of outcome.

I think we all know that hosting those major events costs money, time and effort, but it does pay rewards, whether that is the Euros or more minor sports such as golf, with the Ryder cup being hosted in the UK, as part of Europe, in 2035. I think there is lots that we can be looking at.

It does, but we have to be intentional about it. That does not happen by accident; it happens through intentional planning, which needs to be long-term and invested in.

Many of us have learned from colleagues in Iceland about the accessibility and availability of sports facilities. They have a glorious aim. Debbie, you talked about time and how long it takes to get to a football facility, but theirs are mostly in walking distance. Many of their young people are safe to walk from school to sports facilities and back home by themselves. That would be a lovely thing to happen in the UK. Are sports facilities across the UK sufficiently suitable, diverse and accessible to support a wide range of sports programmes at the moment, and are you seeing any improvements in that area?

Across our EFL charities and football clubs, we made 1,351 of our facilities available for use by local communities in 2023-24. That will include football and other sports facilities, sports halls, meeting rooms, classrooms and dedicated community centres. That is half a million hours for community groups, and about half of that is being provided free of charge or at subsidised rates to local community partners. We think our clubs are doing a great job of listening to communities and responding to their needs by allowing them access to these facilities and engaging with them about how best to use the facilities. Some of our clubs are doing a grand job of protecting time and spaces to respond to specific marginalised communities and what they want. Of course, there is always more that can be done. We know that central budgets are under pressure, and we cannot rely on football club facilities to deliver most of that. Certainly, we feel that we are opening up our doors and making those amazing community facilities attached to football clubs available.

Ali and Ruth, many schools have fantastic sporting facilities, but we hear time and again from clubs and schools that have outsourced the management of these sports facilities that there is a real disconnect between what those outsourced management companies do with their facilities and a community’s need. I see that particularly with hockey and other sports that require floodlit pitches. Is there more that can be done to tackle this issue?

Thank you for picking up on this; it was going to be one of the things I raised. The first thing to state is that, with quite a lot of the original PFI builds, schools did not have any say—they were contracted into them. Where this is happening so often at the moment is where either the costs of running the facility beyond the school day or the inability to fund the management of it—the letting of it, the caretaking of it and so on—do not add up for schools. There are some schools that have done an amazing job and run a very profitable facility service, but where a school is under pressure, particularly in a deficit budget situation, it is a big risk to do it. The Opening School Facilities Fund, which was an investment programme of £57 million over three years, was delivered by a consortium of partners—we were one of them—with the active partnerships leading on it, working with StreetGames and ukactive as well, which looks after the active leisure and recreation sector. That was hugely effective at resourcing skills to specifically open their doors and give schools the capacity funding they needed to put someone in charge of that and make it happen. What was quite brilliant about that funding was that it also asked, in return for the investment, for certain demographics to be represented in the access—because that is the other challenge. When facilities are opened, if they are swamped by adult five-a-side because that is the most profitable business, children do not get access. So it is not only about opening facilities; often they need to be subsidised if they are going to benefit the local community, and schools are often not in a position to provide that subsidy. Lots of other tactical things happen with OSF, such as schools creating entrances to their sports facilities, which mean people do not have to come through the whole school—that is a simple thing—or creating lighting to get to the back of the school to make a safe route to get there. There are a lot of little tactical things that can be done, certainly, but the biggest challenge is that, if these are part of the public estate, they should be open. However, we have to work around what the formula is and how schools are supported to do that. My final point is that we are hopefully on the verge of the reimagination of the PE and school sport partnership network. That is an infrastructure that will support schools to deliver better, higher-quality and more inclusive PE and school sport. I hope that, within that partnership structure, there is a capability to support schools to open their facilities and to do some strategic planning so that we do not end up with a surplus of facilities in the wrong way, but we are meeting need.

Ruth, did you have anything to add?

I do not have anything to add on schools. I think we need to look beyond traditional venues, particularly when we are working with the very least active. Traditional venues can be off-putting and not welcoming; people need to see people like them get out and get active. Our biggest programme has done some brilliant work doing yoga in gurdwaras and wrestling in mosques, and in Thanet they repurposed empty shops on the high street to bring people in—really thinking about where those community spaces are that people want to come into and therefore will be active.

Yes, there are very innovative uses of spaces happening up and down the country; as you say, it is happening at a very local level, but not necessarily at a strategic level. I will move on to equitable access to the facilities that Ali mentioned. We have not mentioned cricket yet, but I am excited that we are getting a cricket dome in Luton North. I absolutely love it and am excited that we can play cricket all year round—happy days! There is, and always has been, a lot of politics within cricket, but there is also an exciting trend in my constituency, and I am sure in other parts of the country, where we are seeing more women and girls playing cricket. How are we going to ensure that we do not see fantastic facilities in the right neighbourhoods, but certain groups being crowded out because, for example, adult five-a-side football, or other adult teams are more profitable than some of the groups and people that need access?

It is twofold. We need a financial model that works because often, as I have mentioned, access for the communities who need it the most may need to be subsidised. There is also the question of whether that is subsidised by more commercial use at other times—so there is an economic model. There is also the question of the expectation of who it will serve and KPIs within contracts to make sure that those are met— something I hope is written into the terms of agreement for the cricket dome. Always with sport it comes down to people and whether the coaches and facility operators working there represent the community that the facility is serving. It comes back to Ruth’s point. For example, the reason why a mosque or a shopping centre is a popular place is that that is where there are the most diverse people or people from different backgrounds. The workforce in physical activity, sport and leisure often still does not represent the diversity of the population. We need a workforce development plan or an intent. I hope that some of the great work that we have been lucky enough to do with young people as volunteers and leaders will stand us in good stead and that we are growing the next generation of the industry. That needs to be part of the mix.

A last question on this: in terms of where the funding has been targeted, we know that 50% of the multi-sport grassroots facilities programme funding went to the 30% most deprived areas. Is the funding being targeted where it is needed most, or is it a bit too early to tell in terms of the results and data that you need?

It is too early to tell. It has been great to see that targeting and we need to continue it. It is targeting places and people: how we combine the two, by targeting those places and ensuring that whatever is being delivered is picking up the least active and delivering for the people there?

I want to follow up on equitable access to facilities. Ali will probably be able to pre-empt what I am going to ask. When you worked with young people from my constituency at a roundtable, the girls were often saying that they ended up having their practices last, later or at more awkward times than the boys’ or adult teams. Is that something that we see across facilities, and how are we combating that?

We often see that across traditionally male sports. We are trying to embed women into what is a male-dominated and historically male-filled environment. That is not justifying or trying to legitimise that—but it is often the case. There is a bit of supply and demand here. I mentioned five-a-side football, but I probably should have said that it is male five-a-side adult football that is crowding it out because that is where the massive demand is coming from. It is important that we do not always think about facilities. Ruth mentioned other spaces, but we should consider open space. We have had loads of projects that have done brilliant work with young girls, particularly in community places such as parks, where they have not thought they would be welcome or could do activity. Once the programme has gone there and occupied the space for a while, those girls now have a place and a sense of belonging. There is a big risk here with the amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 and the changing role of Sport England as a statutory consultee. We need some safeguards so that these places get protected and that Sport England plays a role in more than just preventing something from being built on; as you know, has a role in helping with planning more generally for the longer term. At the same time as potential changes to Sport England’s role, we also have an amendment about place efficiency and local authorities potentially being obligated to have sufficient spaces for young people. There is a bit of tension going on in some policymaking, but we should not forget about the green and the blue and the grey spaces as important places. The previous panel said that young people do not necessarily define a building; they just want a safe space and somewhere to go. That is the same for women and girls with football. Yes, they should have a right to have the best playing surfaces and to play at times that are right for them, but they also need to feel that those open spaces are safe spaces where they can go.

I think Sport England is funding a broad range, so not through the Football Foundation, and the London Marathon Charitable Trust and others are funding a broad range of sports. It is about having a good mix of traditional sports, team sports and some of the urban sports coming through that really speak to young people and bring people together. It is critical to diversify as much as possible, but there should also be space for movement and just being physically active, as well as for organised sport.

There is one thing we are piloting at the moment, so it is early days. Traditionally, youth sport has been single-sport. They will go to the swimming club, the tennis club or the football club, and often the pressure is on the parents—financially and timewise—to take their child to different places on different nights if they want them to experience a variety of sports. We do not have a tradition of multi-sport provision. We have leisure centres, but not multi-sport clubs, which I guess in my day would have been the youth clubs where one day we played table tennis and then we did floor hockey or whatever. We have lost the youth centres and we do not have multi-sports, so we are piloting after-school clubs, hopefully, as part of the curriculum assessment review panel put to the Department. The Department for Education responded very positively on enrichment, and how we need after-school provision that is genuinely multi-sport so it will appeal to more children and give them the chance to find a choice that they like, and then they can go into specialist community sport pathways.

To expand on the point made earlier, we see football facilities being opened up for multi-sports. For example, to refer to the previous question, when school provision ceases, we have a number of football club charities that are actively engaging with their local schools to come in and manage activities, because they have coaches who are trained not just in football but in multi-sports. We have to learn from some good examples. Across our football club charities, I would say that we are seeing an improved and increased focus on provision for women and girls, and that is from age three up. If you focus on what works and what is a good model, through our Sky Bet building foundations fund, we have recently funded a sports facility at Port Vale. The feedback that we got when we looked at the applications for the allocation of that funding was that the women in that community were being squeezed out of an evening by the local five-a-side, so we have specifically stipulated that women and girls have to take priority when they are using those facilities, because that need, which the football club has listened to, has to be front and centre of that delivery. If we start to learn from some of those models from the groups that are working with and listening to communities, we can get ahead of this and make sure that those marginalised groups are not squeezed out of using some of these facilities, and that we can use them for broader sport.

All that was fascinating. I was thinking in horror about the way the skate park in my town is pushed to the worse location possible, which very much speaks to what you are saying. I want to ask about how we make sure that programmes are open to people who are more marginalised, either for socioeconomic reasons or because of disabilities. How do you make sure that people from more challenged socioeconomic backgrounds can access these programmes?

Our longest programme was called Get Out Get Active and involved an investment of £7.5 million a year in two phases, looking at engaging the very least active in physical activity. It was delivered by Activity Alliance—which was the English Federation of Disability Sport—across the UK with disability sport partners. They looked at a model that delivered what we called being active together. We found in the initial consultation that supply was not the problem; there was a lot of physical activity and sport, both in mainstream and in disability offerings. Where there wasn’t that supply was for peer groups and families who happened to have a disabled person in them to take part together as equals. They are the most likely to be the least active. The programme focused on really reaching out and taking it into the communities. It was delivered nationally, but local delivery organisations were appointed to work with the marginalised groups, and to work really deeply on what they wanted to see. What physical activity would appeal to them and their families? What did they want to do? Because it was long-term funding, they were able to work slowly, take small steps and develop trust. We found that, across the programme, 44% of the people who took part would have been classified as the least active when they joined, and 77% of them sustained physical activity levels for more than six months after leaving. It was about that slow start, going into the community and really understanding the specific barriers for specific groups. For example, they worked with home-schooled children in Wales, the LGBT community in Liverpool and veterans coming out of service in Wiltshire. Rather than taking a broad, blanket approach, they worked in locations to think about who the least active and most marginalised groups were and how they could deliver effectively for them.

EFL clubs and their charities are already delivering a number of programmes to marginalised groups. For example, we are working with 2,000 refugees across 40 clubs, we are working on offender reintegration and youth crime prevention, and we are working with disabled people. We are also focusing on cultural celebration. To give you an example, in one community sports leader programme we worked with 100% refugee girl participants aged 16 to 24. Every single one of the girls who took part in that programme, which was funded by UEFA, became a sports coach in their local community, so you can really see that investment go full circle and start to perpetuate even broader work in that community. That is done through the power of sport, and it is creating a lasting, self-perpetuating impact.

To build on and try to complement that, because I agree with everything that has just been said, when children are at school, they are a captive audience, and that is an opportunity to serve everybody. In every other subject in the curriculum we serve everybody, and it is really important that physical education and sport do the same. One of the campaigning points for our charity is more play time for children in school. We want to give equal access for everybody to be active: they are on site and in school with some space or facility, so how do we make sure that that is maximised? With the erosion of school lunch breaks—the shortest one I have heard of is down to 25 minutes—there is no time to move. Of course, all the evidence around why lunch times are shortened says it is because schools want to reduce behaviour incidents; similarly, a ton of evidence says that more active lunch breaks reduce behaviour incidents. It is that, plus active uniforms when children are at school, particularly at primary school. We are seeing this grow, but it is a social movement rather than anything that we can legislate for. It is about sharing that practice, because when children go to school in an active uniform with active soles, they are going to move more anyway in the spaces they have. There are also examples of the Government-funded school games organiser network doing some brilliant work with local facilities, where they are getting off-peak, free-to-access passes, so key stage 4 PE is going off site, because it falls at an off-peak time for the local gym, health club or leisure centre. That again gives everybody the entitlement. One of the challenges is how not to raise children’s aspirations, because they get a free pass when they are at school but can never return to that facility again if they cannot afford it. Making more of the school estate is one of the really big ways we can tackle equality of access.

How do you deal with all the extra hidden costs around sports? We are talking about uniforms, but there is also the need to pay for sports kit, for transport to and from facilities, for subs for clubs and things like that. I assume that some of that is a challenge. How have you worked to overcome the more hidden build-up costs?

The transport one is huge. We heard of one SGO area where the local transport provider through the local authority changed their policy, and there was something like a £60,000 bill for them to continue to run the same extra inter-school competition programme that year compared with the previous year. Well, that’s it—it’s gone. There is no way that anyone will be able to meet that. These are very real costs. The answer to it includes thinking about how we can run virtual competitions—for example, a running or athletics competition where everyone logs their scores digitally, and they are playing against another school but they never travel anywhere. But that undermines the social connection and social cohesion, and all those sorts of reasons. You are absolutely right. We have to see how it goes, but the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill includes a limitation on the number of school-branded items in the uniform, to reduce costs for families. If that was just a PE kit, we can solve both, because we can go to school in the PE kit and do PE in it, instead of having to have two kits.

Another thing is understanding some of the potentially unintended consequences of subsidy—giving things away for free and making people more active. We found in Get Out Get Active that, sadly, some disabled participants were concerned about the potential impact on their benefits of having free passes to leisure centres and being visibly more active. It is critical to work with those communities to understand what the hidden costs and concerns might be before you start. I am sad to say that that was a surprise to us when it came out through the evaluation.

That is a really sharp point. That is very interesting. To bring it back to community cohesion as a big picture, how effective do you think sport and participation as a whole can be in tackling prejudice in society?

It can be hugely impactful and powerful when you harness the shared passion and the lack of stigma about engaging. For example, at Huddersfield football club they have used matchday activation. They have thousands of people in a stadium and have built positive cultural campaigns. We know that if footballers are spreading positive messages, the people in that stadium are going to listen. If they are listening, their wider network will listen. We have seen some really positive examples of that done through sport, when we harness what works and the organisations that do not have that stigma are listening to and very in touch with their local communities.

Breaking Boundaries, which Ali will probably say more about, was delivered at a time when there were some really deep concerns about racism in cricket. It was an area that the delivery organisations felt they needed to address in a sensitive way. Sporting Equals and the Youth Sport Trust were able to offer a space, through community sport, for young people who were concerned about racism and discrimination to talk about it. Their views were not just talked about; they gave permission for their thoughts to be shared with the independent inquiry into the scandal. Creating those spaces and bonds, particularly for young people but also generally in the community, to be able to talk sensibly about the discrimination and stigma that we see in sport and in society is a powerful mechanism. Spirit of 2012 has also been working on disability participation and disability visibility, and how we can get a more nuanced view when it comes to the Paralympics creating brilliant role models and the reality for disabled people accessing sport and physical activity. Done well, sporting environments can give you a place to have a nuanced conversation, but delivery organisations need to be supportive to have that with their participants.

Although we can see these big national moves against prejudice and discrimination, has enough been done yet at the grassroots level to tackle abuse and discrimination?

There is some great work going on across the charity network that I represent, in terms of having inspiring leaders, trusted adults and great coaches who are really engaging with young people. There is a project run by Cambridge United, in partnership with another community organisation called Pledge United, and they work with young boys on positive behaviour and healthy relationships. They are making sure that we are tapping into that and are ensuring that they are role modelling what good looks like in terms of the lack of misogyny and that kind of behaviour. Some really good work is going on across sport and we should scale that up.

To answer your question, no, I don’t think we are doing enough. If we’ve got child-on-child stabbings because of fragmentation in society, we are not doing enough, because that is just not natural. It should not happen. I always defer to what Desmond Tutu said: we should not be trying to pull people out when they are drowning in the river; we should be getting upstream and stopping them falling in. We are not finding ways to allow childhood to develop in a more natural way, or using the levers available to us to build attitudes, values and behaviours that will stop some of this stuff happening. We are in the mindset of using sport to solve problems. You mentioned earlier, Debbie, the period after the riots: sport comes in after the event, when we are trying to pick up the pieces. How do we see it as our superpower as a nation, to build the stronger communities and the happier, healthier young people and adults who are more productive in the workplace? We do not use it in a way that could prevent some of the issues. We are often in the mindset of trying to use it afterwards. I will finish on what Ruth said: I also believe that sport is neutral. It is not good; it is neutral. It is what we do with it that makes it good. On the whole point about how we frame sport, prepare the workforce and invest in it with an intent to deliver particular outcomes, we talked about discrimination in cricket, and that did not do a lot for social cohesion. I would find it difficult to get behind sitting here and saying that sport has got it sorted.

It is also about how you fund the activity around it. For funders, it is no good funding just the sports session when we know it is the social mixing and the stuff that happens around it that helps people to develop bonds and can help to reduce stigma and bring people together. How can funders and others say that if they are funding a physical activity session that is 45-minutes long? The funding actually needs to be for an hour and a half, so that people can have a cup of tea, be welcome and make friends. I know Kim has done a lot of work on loneliness; some of the same principles around deep bonds and that feeling of connection apply to social cohesion. This is about how we can make the sport and physical activity system work for those outcomes and really deliver its potential.

That is a perfect place to end, on a message of hope and how we can use the power of sport. You have all demonstrated the potential and the good work that has been going on, but where we could also do more, so thank you very much.