Government is tightening the screw on young people's lives

It is staggering that just two generations ago, the Conservative Party study group on youth policy was advancing ideas that would have put the Labour government of 1997 to shame. It advocated training and employment guarantees, more robust political education and the dramatic strengthening of youth participation in schools, albeit amid rising concern about youth unrest and social upheaval. Unsurprisingly, however, few of those ideas were pursued, let alone implemented, by the incoming Thatcher government of 1979.

Eighteen years later, Blair's Labour government instituted its de facto Ministry of Youth, the Social Exclusion Unit, and produced a raft of measures designed to improve young people's opportunities and enable their effective engagement in education and work, family life and civil society. Initiatives started around school exclusion, teenage pregnancy, homelessness and young people not in education, employment or training. Beyond the social exclusion unit, radical reforms of youth justice, new compacts with the voluntary sector and "new deals" for young people were put in place. The mantra was "youth support", although the velvet glove often had a hardly concealed iron fist within it - penalties and sanctions for non-compliance with the opportunities being made available.

Fast-forward another 18 years, and the mantra is now firmly on "youth obligation". There is no longer any pretence about enabling young people to take up offers in education or the labour market, but a stark framework for ensuring that young people do what they are told. The first unilateral Conservative budget in a generation has pilloried the young. The government was depicted by one journalist as engaging in "acts of intergenerational war" and the Chancellor George Osborne portrayed as having "turned on the young with single-minded viciousness".

A new report by the Intergenerational Foundation reveals a 10 per cent deterioration in prospects of the younger generation relative to the old in the past five years. It is a catalogue of debt, dependency and, increasingly, despair - as "deals" between learning and earning, and other future possibilities, simply cannot be predicted or planned. Is it worth going to university, now that maintenance grants have been abolished and replaced by loans? If not, what is the alternative, at a time of unprecedented youth unemployment?

Many of the jobs that may be available will typically pay a pittance; the planned national living wage is applicable only to those over the age of 25. While the Chancellor announced the end of entitlement to housing benefit for those aged 18 to 21, and an "intensive regime of support" (read "compulsory activity") from day one of a benefits claim for the same age group, a former World Bank economist asserted that "the UK, like other developed countries, has engaged in fiscal, educational, health and environmental child abuse". It is a damning indictment.

Academic theory has, for three decades now, discussed the prolongation of youth and the precarious entry into adulthood. In the 1980s, that threshold shifted from 16 (the minimum school leaving age) to 18, as more young people stayed on in education and others, at first voluntarily and later were required to take part in youth training schemes. Wherever policies denied those above 18 the same treatment as those above 25, there were cries of unfair play. How could it be fair, it was maintained, for adults in identical circumstances to receive different benefits depending on which side of 25 they were?

Those arguments have now vanished. There appears to be a consensus that the threshold for entry to adulthood is 25, and no younger than 21. If that is the case, we need to adjust all applicable policies accordingly, including those in relation to young offenders and young people in care, as well as youth work and youth services. Otherwise, we will be faced with a striking dual and divided pathway to adulthood: (decreasing numbers of) young people cushioned into their mid-20s by individualised family support, and (increasing numbers of) young people tossed around for a decade or so without any adequate level of support, guidance, direction or opportunity.

Such contrasting routes have been observable for some time, but now they will be more firmly cast in stone, as the screw is turned once more.

• Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of South Wales