Ping-pong and pool won’t fix lawless London

Earlier this month, London mayor Sadiq Khan announced that a late-night youth club will be established in every London borough. The £30million of funding for the ‘Youth Lates’ programme would provide ‘positive opportunities’ after school, at weekends and during the holidays in each of the city’s 32 boroughs. I guess the mayor had to do something to get London’s night-time economy going.

The announcement followed hot on the heels of two nights of rioting in Clapham, in a so-called ‘link-up’ between young people. So serious was the unrest that it required the deployment of 100 police officers, four of whom were assaulted. More soberly, four young people were killed over the Easter weekend in London in violent attacks. One was a 14-year-old shot dead in Woolwich. Another was a 21-year-old film student fatally stabbed on Primrose Hill. He had been at the picturesque spot, in the daytime sunshine, testing out a new film camera recently gifted to him for his birthday.

Will the new youth clubs do anything to avert tragedies like these? It seems unlikely. While there is little agreement on whether knife crime is increasing in London, what we do know is that 29 per cent of all knife offences take place in the capital. So we need to do something.

Khan claims, ‘I’ve seen from my own experience growing up in south London the difference youth clubs made to me and my brothers, with somewhere to not just play table tennis and pool and do boxing, cricket and football, but also in providing a safe space for us to go’. Likewise, Labour MP for Stratford and Bow, Uma Kumaran, welcomed the news, claiming it would help young people in her patch of east London, ‘after years of austerity which closed youth clubs and cut services to the bone’.

But a quick Google search will show you there’s no shortage of free activities already on offer in Newham, one of the borough’s covered by Kumaran’s electorate. There are free sports classes. There’s the optimistically-named Fight for Peace. There’s an array of activities at Royal Wharf Community Dock. There are evening events at Newham Libraries. And there’s a brand-new, state-of-the-art, £8million ‘Youth Zone’, which opened just two years ago.

The same is true in Clapham. Presumably, the young people recently ransacking shops were not doing it in protest at the planned chess tournament being cancelled and the local library’s insufficiently extensive collection of Jane Austen. In Clapham, there are two youth clubs within a short walk of the Common – the Clapham Youth Centre and the Devas Club. What’s more, Khan’s announcement came just days after the UK government opened its first wave of ‘Youth Futures Hubs’, in areas of high knife crime and anti-social behaviour, including in London’s Tower Hamlets.

Clearly, there are plenty of places in London for young people to spend time in a warm and safe environment. Indeed, the number of such places is far higher than it is outside the capital. You know where it is safe and enjoyable? London’s galleries and museums. And they are increasingly open late – the Barbican is open every single day until 11pm. It’s free, too.

The left will howl that, of course, youth clubs aren’t the only solution, but we should surely welcome them as part of the answer. Perhaps. Despite everything, I am not intrinsically opposed to youth clubs – if they can be run competently. Khan’s scheme is reminiscent of the 1990s ‘midnight basketball’ initiative in inner cities in the US, and there are studies that suggest it was successful. Some of these, notably a 2024 report for the Institute for Fiscal Studies, have suggested that youth clubs do have benefits for educational performance and in reducing youth crime. Though the study in question failed to differentiate between a strict environment offering boxing classes, say, and an ill-disciplined free-for-all with a few ping-pong tables, which surely makes a large difference.

Besides, the £30million pledged by the London mayor has to come from somewhere. Is it really a good use of money if it comes at the expense of boosting detention capacity or police numbers? And what if the clubs themselves, rather than providing a safe and neutral space, become places of violence, or cause well-behaved kids to get in with the wrong crowd? Or, indeed, become places for drug dealers to find customers, and phone snatchers to sell their loot? If you really want to give young people a sense of purpose and something to do, then fix the economy so they can get a job. Or, even better, encourage them to start their own business.

The biggest problem with the focus on youth clubs, however, is the deflection. Deflection, that is, from the real causes of violent crime: joblessness, absent fathers, failures of migrant integration, weak policing, a lack of strict discipline in schools, an abdication of parental responsibility and a societal turn against self-discipline. And, for that matter, the failure to put in place proper protections for police officers so they do not fear losing their jobs from bogus accusations of racism should they seek to get tough on perpetrators.

Youth clubs feel like the thing you resort to when you’ve run out of ideas. Now, who’s up for a game of ping-pong?

Ameer Kotecha is a former diplomat and now the CEO of the Centre for Government Reform.