Tom Wylie, chief executive of the government-funded National Youth Agency, said yesterday that if the Government wanted adolescents to show more respect to others it should stop branding them yobs and treat them as valued members of society.

“In order to get respect from the young, you need to show respect towards the young,” Mr Wylie told a Local Government Association conference in London. His comments come after the Prime Minister’s promise last month that the Government would pursue an agenda of “reform and respect”, and clamp down on antisocial behaviour among young people.

Mr Wylie said young people were fed up with being called potential troublemakers by politicians. “One of the reasons young people do not always behave well is because they don’t feel valued by adults, and this gives them a feeling they are not going anywhere in life.”

Young people could be helped to develop self-respect and feel valued through traditional youth clubs, sports facilities, theatre groups, music workshops, computing classes or other group activities where they could learn personal and social skills.

“Young people don’t learn respect through osmosis. They need good youth work, managed by respectful adults, who can tell them, ‘That’s not how to speak to your mates, that’s not how to lose a game or treat a girl in a club’,” Mr Wylie said.

It was absurd that the Government was prepared to spend £50,000 a year for every young person kept in a young offender institution but only £71 a year on activities that might prevent them from being sent there in the first place.

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