Core indicator
Youth sector
Local authority expenditure for youth services
Last updated March 2024
(March 2024)
Last reviewed: January 2025
What is this sector and how are we measuring it?
Youth services can provide young people with important spaces and sources of support outside of the home. We also know that budget cuts have led to increasing pressure on youth workers and the closures of many spaces for young people, such as youth centres. While the evidence isn’t strong, a report by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport shows a link between decreases in youth expenditure and increases in bike theft, shoplifting, weapons possession and reoffending, although not violent crime.
Learn more about YEF’s work within the youth sector, and the evidence-based approaches for what works in reducing violence.
To give us a broad picture of what’s happening in the youth sector, we’ve chosen spending on young people’s services as our core measure. This includes universal provision (e.g. leisure, cultural and sports-based activities, often based in youth centres) and targeted provision (e.g. substance misuse or teenage pregnancy services). The latest (2023/24) data was published in December 2024. We’ve adjusted these numbers to account for inflation using GDP deflators published by ONS and present all spending in real terms based on that adjustment.
What does our core indicator show?
Overall, this measure shows a mixed picture. There have been significant reductions in the grants paid to local authorities over the past decade. Consequently, the amount of money spent by local authorities on youth services has also fallen. The last two years (2021/22 and 2022/23) showed slight increases, but in the latest year spending has stalled again. In 2023/24 the total spending on youth services in England was £474 million. In real terms, this is down 0.3% from the previous year (2022/23) and down 49.5% from ten years ago (2014/14), but up 7% on the year before Covid (2019/20).