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Axel Landin |
Teen politicians slammed
Youth Council members ‘out of touch’ and ‘unrepresentative’
JUST two years after the teenage version of the Town Hall was set up, Camden’s first Youth Council have been bruised by stinging criticism of their work.
The British Youth Council (BYC), an independent charity, spent the summer reviewing the work of Camden’s kid parliament before coming up with an unflattering report, published on Friday.
It accused the Lib Dem councillors who started the scheme of not giving it adequate support and attention – even though Lib Dems have claimed the project as a major achievement.
The report also said the Youth Council was “undemocratic, non-inclusive and non-participative” and ordered the cabinet system be scrapped in favour of “action group teams”.
Taking a surprisingly critical line on the young politicians involved, it states: “There were concerns from Camden officers and other young people from the borough that the current Youth Councillors were ‘out of touch’ with other young people, and not representative of the vast majority of the young people within the borough. It was clear that the characteristics and manner of some members of the Youth Council had contributed to the decline in participation.”
However, it went on to criticise the council for not training the less confident members, adding: “Whilst individual talent should be celebrated and capitalised on, BYC feel it is the responsibility of the council to provide suitable training and personal development opportunities for all youth councillors.”
Blaming the lack of advice and support on the “political will” of Camden, the report said officers “adopted a ‘hands-off’ approach from the start”.
The youth councillors spent three months last year without any support at all last year.
Concern was also raised about how the teenagers spent a £100,000 budget – particularly the decision to buy schoolbooks.
Axel Landin, 18, the former leader of the Youth Council who resigned in April, warned that taking “sovereignty” away from young people left them with a “tokenistic and toothless” Youth Council.
His brother Conrad, 16, councillor for the Fortune Green ward, argued that the report was not a criticism of the young politicians because the failings it highlighted were the direct result of a lack of support.
He said: “The report is harsh in lots of ways but I feel the BYC are failing to connect particular issues with the lack of training that obviously caused them.”
Lib Dem children services chief Councillor Janet Grauberg said the review had “inevitably showed us what we can do better, learning from what hasn’t worked so well.”
She added: “Camden Council is determined to support an inclusive Youth Council to empower all young people to be involved and make a difference.”
Elections for a new Youth Council take place in December.
Toothless youth councils are nothing new - but it's a shame to see it in Camden writes AXEL LANDIN
It's no coincidence that when you hear of youth councils you generally imagine a talking-shop of youngsters in a youth club, overwhelmed with never-ending strategies and initiatives by bureaucrats who pay lip-service to participation and involvement but who have no real inclination of eroding their own swollen power-bases by giving young people a real say in decision-making.
This is what I've seen time after time in my fact-finding expeditions to so many similar bodies from Kent to Caithness - at best it's an illusion of influence and at worst deeply patronising.
That's why when the drawing board came out for Camden's first ever youth council three years ago I wanted to do something different. The first major break with convention was winning control of an unprecedented six-figure budget. So when the dynamic youth cabinet who set about making real changes for the better, determined to spend every penny of our generous pot to the direct benefit of our generation, it meant investing £10,000 into schools to give budding Olympic athletes the best sports facilities they could ask for. It meant launching a groundbreaking youth project, True Colours, which enthused and inspired hundreds of underprivileged young people who otherwise had very little going for them in the way of opportunities. It meant giving every young person in Camden's schools the chance to personally pick the books they wanted to restock our dilapidated and outdated libraries - handing the democratic process down to ground level.
As with any new organisation there were always going to be teething problems. It's a learning curve - everyone knew that from the start. But when the time came to evaluate the youth council's achievements and consider its future development, it pains me to say that the Liberal Democrat administration got it badly wrong. They cancelled this year's elections and engaged the British Youth Council (an organisation with a questionable record in participation considering that they could only manage a 10% turnout of their member organisations at their Annual General Meeting) to conduct a wide-reaching review, which returned its findings this week.
The money was not well-spent. They spoke to only four of the thirty-six youth councillors elected last year, compared to twenty paid adult officials. The youth council's founding documents were compiled solely by young people, so one might think any replacement would need to be exceptional, but the newly proposed constitution appears to have been designed on the back of a cigarette-packet - riddled with bad English and factual inaccuracies.
It advocated the further cancellation of the next set of elections (who was it who once said 'if voting changed anything they'd abolish it'?), the abolition of the youth cabinet, restricting budget spend to publicity initiatives and told the bureaucrats to 'summon up the courage to say no' to young elected representatives. These recommendations mark a step in the wrong direction. From my years in young people's democracy I know full-well that it is this kind of measures that ward off young people from getting on board this vital cause. The Youth Council should have done more to include local young people - but it was not for want of trying. It was shocking to hear the BYC propose as its own brainchild a network of issue-based 'youth action teams', which youth councillors themselves had come up with spontaneously and had begged Town Hall chiefs to set up for over a year.
This mission of engagement can only be achieved by giving young councillors devolution of meaningful powers and real independence - without which the youth council could not have intervened to save the ambitious young people's cycling project in Regents Park this summer which the council had shamelessly refused to fund.
Last week was Local Democracy Week, and the popular "youth question time" event further exposed this worrying trend: despite last year's equivalent evolving to include on the panel representatives from the Youth Council as well as adult councillors, this year young politicians were cast aside. The value of youth council inclusion in this forum was demonstrated last year when young people in attendance reported that the local authority had turned a blind-eye to the installation of the highly-discriminatory mosquito youth-deterrent siren. Within days a delegation of young councillors were protesting outside the offending off-licence, and with a campaign attracting front-page coverage and support from Shami Chakrabarti, the devices were eventually banned throughout the borough - a victory for my generation and for common sense.
Camden Youth Council is a unique opportunity for empowering young people. But the only empowerment that we want is real empowerment. It can't be tokenistic or toothless. We must work together to ensure that the new youth council has the support that it requires and deserves, in order to see a new raft of young activists climb aboard to deliver further progress this year and beyond.
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