Hansard

I add my congratulations to Andrew Welsh on securing this debate and compliment him on his thoughtful speech, to which I listened with great interest.

Andrew Welsh's speech struck a chord with me because of my involvement with the Tain youth cafe, in my home town, which is run on similar lines to the Arbroath CAFE. The project is about getting young people off the streets and making them feel that they have a role. That approach has proved successful in the Highlands, as well as in Arbroath. I hope that the model can be replicated elsewhere, as I have seen how it works. It is very much to the good not just of the young, but of us all.

Alex Johnstone said that the approach of the Arbroath CAFE is not top down, but bottom up. That is a colossal strength. When I took Jim Wallace to the Tain youth cafe in the summer, we were both taken aback by the sharpness of the questions that we were asked and the young people's ability to take us on. They would not be put off by a glib answer from J Stone and continued to probe further. They felt empowered by the fact that they had their own premises, which were their territory.

I want to make two points that follow on from that experience. First, in my time as a councillor on Highland Council, we established a Highland youth parliament. That approach has been replicated in many other parts of Scotland. Although the object of such initiatives is laudable, often they are led by a combination of local authorities and, perhaps, the NHS. Sometimes there is a danger that they will be top down, rather than bottom up. The Highland youth parliament decided that it wanted to debate the legalisation of cannabis. Members can imagine the sucking in of teeth that that caused among representatives of the NHS and the local authority, which had paid for the body to be set up. However, the incident demonstrated that, if we set up a youth parliament, we must be willing to let young people have their own voice.

Secondly, how many community councils do we know that include a couple of 16 or 17-year-olds among their members, to express the opinions of young people? There are some, but not many. Often, when problems relating to young people are flagged up—at all levels of democracy—I hear people say that they must speak to the head teacher rather than to the young people themselves. That issue is linked to the points that Andrew Welsh made today. We have a golden opportunity for the future.

When we get things right and empower young people so that they feel they are involved—building on youth cafes by setting up youth parliaments, encouraging young people's participation in community councils and who knows what else—their awareness of politics is increased. I do not want to debate whether people should be given the vote at 16, but too often we see youngsters who feel disfranchised and are not involved in the political process. The turnout at elections among the youngest voters is appalling. The great advantage of projects such as the Arbroath CAFE is that they offer a way of reversing the decline in voter turnout. How we tackle that problem is a test not just for the Executive, but for us all. The project that Andrew Welsh has described is a firm foundation on which to build. I commend it to the Parliament.