‘Youth’ was a prominent topic at the 2019 Social Policy Association annual conference, and the following chapters look at this broad theme from a variety of methodologies and perspectives, including youth transition studies, cultural policy and criminal justice. The widespread interest in young people is perhaps not surprising since it has been widely recognised that the 2008/09 crisis and subsequent austerity policies have had severe impacts on young people across Europe in many Social Policy fields. For instance, the spike in youth unemployment led to concerns about a ‘lost generation’, which, in turn, sparked a range of labour market programmes for young people. Young people are also strongly affected by more long-term labour market changes, often described as the ‘gig economy’, in which hyperflexible and precarious employment forms are becoming normalised. Important intra-generational inequality trends notwithstanding, an increasing intergenerational wealth divide is manifested most clearly in housing due to the soaring property prices over the last decades mainly benefiting the ‘baby boomer’ generation. The increasing precarity of the youth labour market and the unaffordability of housing make it more difficult for current young adults to ‘get on the property ladder’, which is an important milestone for young people in liberal welfare states such as the UK.

Despite the strong reliance on the market in liberal welfare states, a tacit assumption of the UK's welfare state is that young people will be able to use their family of origin as a source of welfare while making their transition to adulthood. Indeed, the residualist nature of liberal welfare regimes pushes young people towards their family for support when transitions are ‘prolonged’ or ‘disjointed’. Despite identifying the prominence of the family welfare source, less is known about its impact beyond the youth transition period. Sarah Weakley's comparative study in this volume uses longitudinal data from the 1970 British Cohort Study and the 1997 US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to analyse the impact of implicit and explicit family welfare resources on young people's transition to economic independence. In both the UK and the US, the commonly used measure of parental socioeconomic background was a factor that persisted and intensified as cohort members moved through a transition. Rather than inequalities reducing into adulthood, inequalities widened.

The UK political debate in 2018 was dominated by one single topic – Brexit. This often overshadowed other important socio-political developments, such as the funding crisis of the National Health Service (NHS), the failing social care system or the mounting problems in relation to the roll-out of Universal Credit. When the draft European Union (EU) Withdrawal Agreement was finally presented in November, a number of cabinet members instantly resigned in opposition to the deal negotiated by the Prime Minister. Among them was Esther McVey, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Her resignation was met with little sympathy on social media, to put it mildly; a frequent comment on Twitter was that she should have resigned much earlier, namely, when it transpired that she misled Parliament over Universal Credit mistakes. Other social media commentators remarked that the timing of her resignation might not be coincidental given the imminent publication of a condemning report by the United Nations (UN) special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, on the state of poverty in the UK. His fact-finding mission collected a vast array of evidence on the misery caused by the controversial Universal Credit roll-out that McVey had defended staunchly during her time as Work and Pensions Secretary.

The scorching review published on 16 November 2018 criticised the immense growth in foodbanks, the number of people being homeless and rough sleeping, a sense of deep despair, and unheard levels of loneliness and isolation. In his accompanying statement, the special rapporteur criticised the UK government in Westminster for being in ‘a state of denial’ over the dire consequences of its austerity-framed welfare reform. The government was furthermore accused by Alston of overturning the post-war welfare state consensus under the guise of economic necessity, while pursuing an ideological commitment to ‘achieving radical social re-engineering’. As a consequence, great misery has been inflicted unnecessarily, especially on the working poor, single mothers, people with disabilities and millions of children (United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 2018).

It is worth repeating the devastating verdict that was reached by Alston as it sums up overall developments in social policy over the past decade.

This section of Social Policy Review 30 assembles some of the highlights of the annual conference of the Social Policy Association held in Durham in July 2017. Although perhaps not as momentous as the previous year, 2017 was undoubtedly an eventful political period, both in the UK and across the globe, as the timely contributions in this section remind us. To name but a few select events, we witnessed a snap UK General Election with surprising results that significantly weakened the Prime Minister and had important repercussions for her (social) policy agenda. It was also the first year in office of an explicitly populist US President, and themes of far-right populism dominated elections and debates in many European countries. Social inequality, the conference's leading theme, continued to be a dominant political issue. At a local level, the extent of inequality became perhaps most painfully visible through the Grenfell Tower fire, as already discussed in Chapter One by Stuart Hodkinson. Yet, further intriguing insights into the global scale of tax evasion and avoidance with important implications for inequality were also revealed through the leak of the Paradise Papers. The use of offshore tax havens by a global elite has massive implications for our welfare systems through lost taxes and for the extent of income inequality. Both taxes and benefits form the backbone of the welfare state, but the British media and public are notoriously obsessed with stories about the benefits side of the welfare system, with a particular focus on ‘benefit cheats’. In contrast, the revelations of the Panama Papers in 2016, followed by the Paradise Papers in 2017, moved the spotlight, at least for a while, onto issues of tax avoidance and evasion.

While the leak of these papers in mainstream newspapers reveals secrets of the world's elite's hidden wealth, there is another ‘hidden world’ of the tax system that demands our attention, as Adrian Sinfield argues in Chapter Five. The tax reliefs and related subsidies of fiscal welfare in the UK contribute significantly but virtually invisibly to maintaining and reinforcing inequality. In his chapter Sinfield examines how tax reliefs support those benefiting from occupational and personal pensions, the largest area of social spending through the tax and National Insurance systems.