For Real Britain, Ros Wynne-Jones visits the Damilola Taylor Centre in Peckham – as government pledges £500 million for youth services in first youth strategy for 15 years
The wind is howling outside the Damilola Taylor Centre in Peckham, the rain rattling the glass atrium roof loud enough to drown out the indoor squeak of trainers on the gym floor.
It’s the kind of cold winter night when the wet streets of South-East London leave nowhere to go. But inside the Centre are a dozen teenage boys playing a fast and furious game of basketball with youth workers from the Active Communities Network, who lead the ‘My Ends’ programme in Southwark.
“It’s taken me two buses to get here,” Sammy, 14, says. “It can take me an hour, but it’s changed me a lot. And having somewhere to come makes you more protected.” Every teenager at the sports centre that night knows about Damilola Taylor and the history of the place they are shooting baskets. And 25 years later, the 10-year-old boy’s fatal walk home from the library is still echoed in the fears they express.
“When I was campaigning to be elected, I was struck by how many young people told me there were no safe spaces,” Peckham’s Labour and Co-operative MP Miatta Fahnbulleh tells me. “I can’t forget one little girl telling me, ‘I’m safe at school, I’m safe at home, I’m not safe in between’. That tells you we are not getting it right for young people – and that’s one of the things I hope to have some impact on.”
Fahnbulleh is also a minister in the Communities department charged with rebuilding social fabric ripped apart by Austerity. Her vision – launched with the Co-operative Party and outlined to local youth leaders on the day we met at Peckham Levels – is that by 2035 no Peckham child should be more than 10 minutes from a youth service.
She pays tribute to how Southwark Council has kept youth provision going “on a shoestring” during the Tory Austerity years. But she adds: “This is a generation that is lonely. Who feel like the streets are not their streets. Their community is not their community. “My goal is that in 10 years’ time, every young person in Peckham will be within 10 minutes’ walk of a youth provision. If we can create spaces that young people feel are their own, that is foundational.”
Secretary of State Lisa Nandy chose Peckham to launch the government’s new youth strategy just before Christmas. Instead of treading tired tropes on youth violence, the Culture Secretary spoke eloquently of the last 14 years of “violent indifference” faced by “an entire generation of young people”.
The first national youth strategy in 15 years – Nandy joked that kids have had iPhones longer – will see the Labour government invest £500 million in improving youth services. There are plans to build or refurbish 250 youth centres around the country, and to create 50 ‘Young Futures Hubs’ for career and mental health advice.
The plan, linked to other bold Labour reforms including Votes at 16, the new ‘Pride in Place’ neighbourhoods strategy, and Community Right to Buy which will boost community ownership of places like youth clubs, is aimed at transforming young people’s lives where they live.
“It is devastating that young people are now the loneliest age group in Britain,” Fahnbulleh says. “Austerity decimated the places that brought young people together. Places that gave them a sense of belonging and a place for them to feel safe and where they could thrive, disappeared across the country. Today is an exciting start to a different future.”
It’s easy to get a sense of déjà vu in Peckham, especially so close to Damilola’s 25th anniversary. Twenty-five years ago, when I covered the schoolboy’s horrific murder, politicians said never again, with investment in local and national in youth services. But the Cameron-Osborne era saw youth funding slashed. Local government spending on youth services fell by 73% between 2010-11 and 2022-23, with more than 1,000 youth centres closing and more than 4,500 youth worker roles lost.
Youth workers became taxi drivers. Young peoples’ lives sacrificed to the desire to persuade older voters to stick with the Conservatives. Now, some 16 years later, Britain worries and wonders why young people are stuck on screens rather than unsafe streets.
At an event at Peckham’s Mountview Theatre in December organised by the Damilola Taylor Trust – ‘Damilola 25: Legacy of Hope’ – young person after young person spoke about how the state wanted to talk to them about the symptoms not the problems. “Let’s stop talking about knife crime, and start talking about inequality, poverty and loneliness,” 25-year-old Tyrell Davis-Douglin said.
The Co-op Party says safe shared spaces for young people goes to the heart of its Community Britain campaign. “Young people have seen the sharpest end of the loneliness crisis, growing up in a country where shared spaces are vanishing every day,” says its General Secretary Joe Fortune. “Community Britain belongs to everyone, young and old. Good quality youth services, shaped and owned by the young people who rely on them, must be at the heart of our efforts to build strong communities.”
In Peckham, that means not just more physical spaces like the Damilola Taylor Centre but more of the work done by people like MyEnds Southwark – run by the Active Communities Network – running tonight’s basketball game. Volunteer Omar Mohamed, 25, says he sees his work as a counterforce to “bad influencers online and in person”. His diagnosis? “I think young people are suffering from a meaningless crisis,” he says. “What should you do as a young person? What’s my purpose?”
Benedict, 16, attends the basketball sessions. “It’s amazing that they let us come here for free,” he says. “If I wasn’t here, I’d be doing at home doing absolutely nothing. Out there is a lot of peer pressure. It’s like a community here.” A 12-year-old boy says: “Coming here has changed my mentality. I don’t give up now. Before I came here, I wouldn’t try to go for things. I’d just leave it. Now I try to get to perfect.”
Sammy nods. “My behaviour used to be really bad,” he says. “But now I stay focused at school. This place will keep on benefitting me for the rest of my life. If we could all have somewhere within ten minutes’ walk that would make a difference.”
His MP wants to be held to her promise. “In five years’ time, I want us to think, we started here,” Fahnbulleh says. “Within 10 years, I want young people to have somewhere they can go within 10 minutes’ walk. It sounds like a small thing, but I’m going to put my heart, soul and everything into it.”