Tory youth worker: Mentoring scheme nothing new

Plans to mentor troubled teenagers through a mandatory good-behaviour contract are nothing new, it has been claimed.

Shaun Bailey, a Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate and youth worker, said there are already 100 ways for young people to get a mentor at present.

And he compared arguments over the 'baby Asbos' to wider Tory complaints about the government's general attitude, suggesting the measures may have an unfortunate generational side-effect.

"If you have a group of people in society who routinely struggle as parents and then you parachute people in, what are those children going to be like as parents?" he asked on the Today programme.

"They're going to assume that the only way they can make it through life is if they have this outside government support, and it goes to the wider philosophical question for me that our government seems to be hell-bent on making us all dependent on their edicts to survive."