two - Social protection policies for young people: a cross-national comparison

Summary

Introduction

The transition to adulthood has become more complex, more extended, more expensive and more imbued with risk. The different strands of transition (education to employment, family formation, housing and household transitions) each require increasing financial resources. Whether in education, training or the labour market, young people are generally not able to take economic responsibility for themselves: the costs are too high and their incomes too low. This means that they may need to seek economic support either from their families or from the state. As youth has been extended, the need for economic support has become greater, and the question of who will provide it more acute.

This last question will be answered differently in different European countries, since the roles of the state and the family in providing social protection vary. This chapter starts by identifying some of the problems policy makers have to confront in considering support and protection for young people as a specific group. It then explores the national variation in young people's main transition events, and considers the scope for differing constructions of need. It then seeks to define the boundary of responsibility between the state and the family in relation to young people in need of economic support. It does this first by examining state provision with regard to key elements of policies affecting young people's incomes (wage policy, National Insurance, social assistance, housing benefit and support for post-compulsory education). Then, it considers the legal and moral frameworks of family support. Though primarily based on recent research on youth policies in the UK (Jones and Bell, 2000; Bynner et al, 2004), the chapter examines cross-national variation with a range of other European countries. Its ultimate purpose is to set out an agenda for European cross-national empirical research.

Age and dependence

Policy structures designed for the wider population are not easy to apply to young people who are somewhere between the statuses of dependent child and independent adult. It is difficult for policy makers to grapple with the concept of ‘youth’. If ‘youth’ is socially constructed, and varies over time, by gender and culturally, then how can policy makers cope with the extreme variability of circumstances in which young people live?