Yvette Cooper has had a baptism of fire as home secretary – a national tragedy when three girls were murdered at a Taylor Swift-themed dance club and an ensuing week of race riots fuelled by dangerous misinformation.
It has not been easy, but Cooper has been in waiting for more than a decade to take the home secretary job – in the shadow role and as chair of the powerful home affairs committee – and is not about to waste a moment. In fact, her only complaint about the job so far is that her busy schedule and tight security means she is struggling to get enough exercise – apart from the many flights of stairs to her Home Office desk she must climb each day.
She has spent much of the last few weeks focusing on the response to the riots with police chiefs as part of her more “active” approach to policing in contrast to what she terms the “too passive” Home Office of Theresa May.
But today, she is getting out of Westminster to spend time at HideOut, a youth centre in the Manchester suburb of Gorton, as part of her plans to launch a “young future” programme to help steer teenagers away from crime.
Chatting to youngsters at the centre, it is clear there is much work to be done to address their lack of trust in the police. They are certainly tougher questioners than her husband, Ed Balls, whose employer ITV has come under fire for allowing her to be interviewed by him last week – a controversy that has drawn 15,000 Ofcom complaints.
One younger Black teenager tells Cooper he has been stopped and searched three times, just while walking along the street, without being given a reason.
“The whole system has to be fair,” Cooper tells him. “It has to be based on evidence or based on intelligence. And I think a lot of police forces have now worked really hard to try to deal with that.”
James Trimble, 17, also grills her on what she is going to do about keeping young people safe and restoring the police’s reputation. “It’s mainly towards the police, over the past few weeks, the police have been getting a bad reputation,” he says. “Because of the reputation the police have got, young people fear the police.” It is several weeks since the video emerged of an officer kicking a man in the head at nearby Manchester airport, and subsequent footage of officers also being assaulted.
Cooper said it was right that there was a “strong response” to “disgraceful” violence, with perpetrators arrested and prosecuted. But she also spoke about her ambition to “restore neighbourhood policing” where communities know the name of their local officers, and her new “young futures” programme that aims to draw police, mental health workers, youth workers and young offending teams together to support teenagers.
“Policing should be about keeping the streets safe and keeping people safe,” she said. “You need a strong policing response but also to have that relationship.”
The home secretary wrote in the Telegraph this week that there needed to be “action to restore respect for the police and respect for the law”. But she also believes work needs to be done to restore trust, including “work with the police to increase standards”. “There’s a lot of the standards from after the awful murder of Sarah Everard that still haven’t been increased,” she said.
On the same theme, Shahnawaz Ahmed Ghori, 18, said young people of colour were “increasingly disillusioned with the government”, asking her what she would do to take hate and rebellion off the streets and why people have lost faith in politics.
“A lot of the things that the Conservative government did were deeply damaging,” she said. “Some of it is they turned their backs on young people. Part of the reason I wanted to do the young futures programme is because I think, to be honest, your generation has been abandoned and let down … I totally understand the loss of trust.”
Pressed later on whether there would be funding for more youth services and activities such as the air cadets, Cooper said she had to be “honest that money is tight right now”.
“We’ve managed to identify some funds for the young futures programme to identify what more we could do. But we know funding decisions are going to be difficult.”
The youth centre appears to be a godsend for the local community, charging just 50p a session for its holiday club aimed at eight to 19-year-olds – with a boxing gym, music studio and many other activities. One teenager in the cooking workshop offers Cooper a homemade cookie and then tries to enlist her to help plug his TikTok account and make him lots of money. “Very entrepreneurial,” she says.
However, the centre largely does not have the government to thank for its stellar facilities. Its build was mostly funded by £6m from the betting magnate Fred Done, who is also contributing to the building of a second site in Salford. Manchester city council contributed £1.5m in capital plus some of its running costs.
Jamie Masraff, the chief executive of OnSide, the charity behind a network of youth centres, said more of the spaces were desperately needed.
“We have lost 750 youth clubs in the last 14 years. We’ve lost half the youth workforce – 4,500 less than 14 years ago. Public funding for youth provision is a quarter of what it was 14 years ago. Instead of having long-term funding, with which you can employ people for the long term with, you have short, start-stop funding.”
He added: “Knife crime is a very complex issue and there’s no silver bullet to solve it but what we do know is: the work within youth clubs, from an early age, gives young people confidence, positive opportunities. The data from UK Youth shows the areas in London where youth clubs were shut have had a higher rate of youth violence than other areas.”