South Kirkby primary school was targeted by 'teenage vandals' because of funding cuts, MP says

Hemsworth MP Jon Trickett said “one billion pounds of policing cuts by the Conservative government” has led to the desecration of youth services and the subsequent rise in anti-social behaviour.

Speaking during a debate in parliament about anti-social behaviour in town centres, Mr Trickett said issues that a primary school in the village of South Kirkby has been having with local teenagers regularly gathering in a playing field nearby, vandalising property and carrying out other antisocial acts.

He said: “I came to parliament this week from a school in South Kirkby. There is a serious anti-ocial problem there, but the issue is inadequate community policing due to poor funding, along with cuts to the services on which so many people depend.

“We shouldn’t be demonising a generation of young people. The Tories cut £1 billion pounds of funding for youth services.

"So there are few youth provisions in the villages I represent. There are no youth clubs and all sorts of other facilities have closed down as a result of those cuts.

"There is nowhere for our young people to go.”

Mr Trickett’s office said, nationally, youth services have been cut by £1.1bn since 2010/11 – a real-terms fall of 74 – and the annual spend per head on 5-to-17-year-olds in England had plummeted from £158 in 2010/11 to just £37 in 2020/21 (YMCA, 2022).

It said the number of Police and Community Support Officers (PCSOs) had fallen from 16,377 in 2010 to just 8,750, a decrease of almost 50 per cent.

Mr Trickett said: “We don’t see community police in our area. The vacuum that was left when the government cut the police – that's when criminality and anti-social behaviour went rife.

"The Tories have left our communities ill-defended.”

This week the government reached its target to recruit 20,000 more police officers in England and Wales.

The total is now 149,572, which is 20,951 more officers than 2019.

Critics have pointed out many of the new officers are replacing the around 20,000 who left between 2010 and 2019.