In the 2010s as the UK government ushered in an overt policy of austerity and local authorities across the UK saw their budgets decimated, tough decisions had to be made. The price of these decisions couldn’t be fully anticipated at the time; leaders were simply having to manage the retreat of the state, mandated from Whitehall and – mostly reluctantly – implemented locally.
In few policy areas was the impact of austerity more draconian than in services for young people1. Youth centres and assets were sold off, mothballed or, in rare cases transferred to community ownership (such as in this project2 I helped establish in Downham Market, Norfolk). Sure Start Centres, one of the rare examples of a government policy that was proven to work3, were almost universally closed; the Connexions service – that used to track the destination of all young people in an area, compile and address NEET figures, and offer careers support – suffered a similar fate. To many this was an avoidable tragedy born of political ideology and not from any kind of assessment of what is in the best interests – short-term and long-term – of some of our most vulnerable children and families.
When a system is stripped to its bare bones, what is the true impact? We’ve seen, for example, the devastation of USAid leave a giant hole4 in the systems and processes that comprise the humanitarian sector. But while such draconian cuts show up on spreadsheets and ledgers as ‘savings’5, if we don’t attempt to quantify the true cost of those cuts we may never know if they were worth the pain. We need to see, in other words, what lies on the other side of the ledger. Only then can we offset the savings with the true costs of the cuts and come to a balanced judgement as to the true impact.
Since a budget line is just a financial label for specific elements of work it can be harder to know what lies inside the detail. We are more likely to see the tangible impact, such as where cuts lead to staff being made redundant, programmes closed, services withdrawn and capacity reduced. Yet in my experience it’s the intangibles lost along the way that are harder to predict and that often have the deepest impact on people, organisations, and systems. Intangible costs of cuts can have a range of impacts. For example, they can actually drive up costs in other areas, on other services or for other organisations, can reduce margin and increase the fragility of systems, can compound the impact on other aspects of someone’s life, and can remove experience and local knowledge from the frontline.
Of course, there are those who will advocate for such shock tactics as the only real way to figure out where the true value lies in a system or service, and in so doing create the disruption necessary for change. In some cases this is a viable route; we might see this in the new chief executive who leads with a restructure to create the conditions for the change they’ve promised. We definitely saw it with DOGE6. On a smaller scale we might see an enterprising manager pause a non-critical element of a service or function to reveal whether it is really necessary. Indeed, we saw during COVID-19 that sometimes these opportunities, the shaking up of entrenched routines and practices, are sprung upon us. It was this potential for change that I helped teams capture through my Social Moments Framework, identifying those elements of work that would ultimately be paused and restarted, stopped altogether, tested and adopted or be a temporary fix.
However the conditions for change are created, major risks must be mitigated. First, that a restructure becomes an exercise in rearranging deck-chairs on the Titanic and the opportunity to drive change is lost. I think the continuous restructuring of the NHS in England is a case in point, appearing more performative that performance-enhancing. To succeed we have to know how we will get beyond the illusion of change. Next, that into the space for change are layered an overwhelming number of initiatives that aren’t counterbalanced by the things being stopped. We need to create space for the new. A more insidious risk is that real harm will accrue on those who rely most on the systems and services that are being cut. We saw this with USAid. It’s the cost reduction version of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The way to mitigate these is to start by gaining knowledge of the system. And gaining knowledge in this context has to include surfacing both the tangible and the intangible costs of change. How do we anticipate and find these hidden costs and – perhaps – take them into account in our future decision-making and planning processes? Charlie Leadbeater and Jennie Winhall identified four keys7 to systems change which together offer a frame to make sense of these changes. Of particular relevance here is that they highlight the often invisible flows through a system – power, relationships, purpose and resources. In my work in the humanitarian sector we added a fifth, practice, to pick up on how people act within the system, often out of custom and not necessarily adaptive to the changing context.
These keys offer a useful set of prompts, a guide as to where we might look for both tangible and intangible changes. From this we might be able to dig a little deeper to assess the impact. Power, for example8, can take many forms and be held as a currency or flow like a current9; resources are clear when you walk into a community centre on an estate but invisible as local knowledge in the minds of those that work there.Hardest is to see what’s not there, what goes missing when the money stops. Things that used to exist but no are no longer visible. People no longer turning up to do the work. Effects that only emerge after a generational time period. Relationships ended. Local knowledge lost. Aspirations dimmed.
As youth services were cut youth workers were stripped out of the system10. Few remain in local authorities today; the youth workers that we do have are mostly in the voluntary sector. Youth work as a profession was impacted by these cuts as it was no longer an attractive career route. Why go into youth work if there were no clear pathways for development and progression? In a number of local authorities the Government11 is now exploring what it might look like to create a youth service of some description. Not a rebuild, or a return to what was, but an opportunity to re-imagine a new youth sector supporting young people.
There are numerous challenges in doing this, fifteen years on. Most notably is the lack of institutional memory, expertise and system knowledge. Invisible losses that accrue over time and can’t be addressed overnight. Over the course of a generation a whole discipline has largely been eradicated from our local authorities. Their knowledge, approach, tools and methods, perspective, relationships, and experience are no longer in the institutions or the wider systems around young people, nor are they in the lives of young people themselves. In local authorities this has cleared the way for a generation of social work-trained managers and those with a background in education to ascend to the most senior roles in children’s services where their world view and culture dominates. Youth work doesn’t have a seat at the table, and is in many areas a largely forgotten service.
This matters when you consider the different ways that different professions teach people to see the world. Those trained in social care see problems to be solved through individual assessments, service thresholds, referral pathways and service provision. Youth workers are trained to see and attend to the wider context within which issues may arise around a young person. Their work is relational not diagnostic. They don’t stigmatise the young person as having problems to fix so much as work with them in the context of their lives. Upstream and preventative not downstream and reactive. As one youth work-trained manager succinctly put it to me recently: we seek to change the conditions, not fix the problem.
A whole generation of managers and staff have therefore come into public services over the last 15 years with little to no idea that youth work exists, let alone the value it might bring. While the individualised, problem-centred and responsive social care approach dominates children’s services departments, the collective, contextual and relational preventative approach of youth work is rarely to be seen. Senior leadership teams are often comprised people who see the world the same way – as problems to be fixed. There needs to be scope for alternatives.
And there is certainly no easy way of quantifying the impact of these system shifts over the last decade or more, nor of the changes that might result over the coming decade if youth work continues its quiet resurrection. A crucial task in shifting the systems that support young people into a new direction is therefore not only a ‘hearts and minds’ offensive to sell once again the value of the approach and perspective that youth work brings but also to instigate innovative longitudinal approaches to evaluating the impact of this work.
When policy decisions are based only on the quantifiable numbers in budget lines and evaluation reports we should be concerned, for this is to take only one perspective into account, one not well suited to judgement in complex systems. While these have their place, we must also surface and take into account some of the hidden costs. Instead of making cuts from a narrow viewpoint we must broaden our horizons and ask, what is it we are really trying to achieve? What might be the unintended consequences? How might we balance the short-term saving against the long-term costs? And ultimately, what is the possible impact on the people we serve? The young people growing up in Ludlow in Shropshire 12or those living with AIDs in Losotho13.
We are in danger of counting what we can count only because we know we can count those things. But in doing so we miss the point, even if we can’t count the impact of missing the point for years after the event. We have a responsibility to ensure that doing what’s hard isn’t at the expense of doing what’s easy. The ultimate cost is likely to be too high.
1 Cuts in these areas were some of the earliest and deepest to be made (Shropshire’s service is now 98% less than what it was). It was perhaps considered ‘low hanging fruit’ to target services for a non-voting segment of the population and a preventative service whose benefits pay back over a long timeframe and to the wider public purse as opposed to local authority budgets. It’s probably also fair to say that the profession could have done more to advocate for and evidence the value it has on young people’s lives in anticipation of such challenges.
2 https://swanyouthproject.org
3 Most recently: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/short-and-medium-term-effects-sure-start-childrens-outcomes
4 See for example: https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/future-of-us-foreign-aid-development-assistance/what-do-trumps-proposed-foreign-aid-cuts-mean/
5 I’ve always thought this framing to be a particularly pernicious communications sleight of hand by Government
7 https://www.systeminnovation.org/article-building-better-systems
8 https://www.powercube.net/analyse-power/what-is-the-powercube/
9 https://netboardme.s3.amazonaws.com/published/26646/files/040226ec75a49fde180a4bb2284c2f51.pdf
10 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/feb/12/youth-work-cuts-england-map-study
11 https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-local-youth-transformation-pilot
13 https://geographical.co.uk/news/how-lesotho-is-left-reeling-from-us-aid-cuts
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