Core indicator
Youth sector
Local authority expenditure for youth services
Last updated March 2025
(March 2025)
Data published: December 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. Participation in positive activities, such as sports, and access to trusted adults or mentors may also be effective in reducing children’s involvement in crime and violence. Some evidence suggests that cuts to youth clubs during the 2010s may have led to an increase in crime.
We’ve used combined total spending on young people’s services in England and Wales as our core measure to give us a broad picture of what’s happening in the youth sector. This includes universal provision (e.g. leisure and cultural and sports-based activities, often based in youth centres) and targeted provision (e.g. substance misuse or teenage pregnancy services). We’ve adjusted these numbers to account for inflation using GDP deflators published by the Office for National Statistics.
It should be noted that there are other routes to providing services for young people that are not accounted for here.
What does our core indicator show?
Overall, this measure shows a worsening 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 few years (2021/22 – 2023/24) showed slight increases, but in the latest year spending has fallen again. In 2024/25 the total spending on youth services in England and Wales was £475 million. In real terms, this is down 7.7% from the previous year (2023/24), down 0.3% from the year before Covid (2019/20) and down 44% from ten years ago (2014/15).