Austerity, Youth Policy and the Deconstruction of the Youth Service in England

Bernard Davies

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783030038854
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030038861
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This timely book presents a vital analysis of the politics, policy and practice of youth work services in England and the impacts of the austerity agenda introduced after the 2007-08 financial crisis.

Davies frames his research within the ideological, political and economic context of the last decade, contemplating the prescriptions of neoliberalism, and various other socio-political developments. He illustrates how wider government policies, programmes and initiatives have marred the purposes and methods of the Youth Service and youth work facilities, forging connections with what this means for young people and youth work. 

Unique in its depth and detail, this book is one of the first comprehensive, evidenced and up-to-date accounts of UK Youth Policy. It is an essential and invaluable resource for youth educators, researchers, service managers, practitioners and activists, as well as scholars and students of youth studies, social policy, public policy, and history.

© The Author(s) 2019

Bernard DaviesAusterity, Youth Policy and the Deconstruction of the Youth Service in Englandhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03886-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Mapping and Contextualising the Territory: 2007–2018

Bernard Davies¹

(1)

Warkwickshire, UK

Bernard Davies

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The starting date for this book’s account and analysis of youth policies in the UK is 2007—the year of a global financial crisis which over the following months came close to bringing the world’s banking system to collapse and whose impacts on those policies were felt throughout the following decade.

Three ‘contextual’ features here were particularly critical: a neo-liberal ideology which, in often taken-for-granted ways, defined most of the policies’ goals; a reinforcement of the historic power balances already embedded within the society’s political structures and processes; and—particularly high-profile after the crisis—an increasingly unequal access to that society’s economic resources. Directly and indirectly, these markers of the post-2007 period went far to determining what eventually came to be labelled as ‘youth policy ’. This included how ‘youth’ was seen and its needs and problems defined ; the kind of adults young people were expected, even required, to become; and the ways in which the services and programmes mandated to ‘deliver’ those aims were conceived and set up, funded, managed and eventually evaluated. In this period, policies became increasingly preoccupied, too, with how young people viewed and used the newly developing forms of information technology .

This chapter, with commentary, outlines the crucial features of these formative conditions. In particular it seeks to clarify how and why the state, increasingly in collaboration with civil society and for-profit organisations , responded as it did to young people.

The Neo-liberal Context: Via ‘Market Freedoms’ to ‘Self-Regulation’

Though with a longer pre-history , ¹ it was the assumptions and prescriptions of the ideology labelled ‘neo-liberalism’ which, since the 1980s, had shaped the public discourse on young people and government and non-government organisations’ responses to them. Even though the roots of the 2007–2008 financial melt-down lay in the largely uncritical ways in which these ideas had been understood and applied, by those in power they continued to be treated until late in the period as largely self-evident and unchallengeable ‘truths’. ²

What then were their defining features and how did they help shape youth policies ?

Neo-liberalism’s foundation premise has been that ‘the market’ —the supply of goods and services traded for profit—has an in-built and unlimited capacity to generate the wealth that a nation and its population need. To ensure that this potential is fully exploited, the main actors within it—banks and other profit-making institutions—must be allowed to ‘self-regulate’: given maximum freedom from external and especially state direction or even guidance on how they should act. Only then can the market’s presumed intrinsic benevolence be fully realised.

The rationale for these ‘market freedoms’ , however, was not just to ensure that businesses had maximum room for making their profits. They were seen as essential, too, for releasing the competitive energy and drive essential to fully realising the market’s wider wealth-creating possibilities—a process which would in turn, it was assumed, ultimately benefit all citizens including the poorest via a built-in ‘trickle down effect’.

Underpinning all these propositions was a further core premise: that, as Margaret Thatcher put it in the 1980s, ‘there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families’. Certain personal qualities were then seen as particularly (and again self-evidently) ones which all citizens needed to display in their daily lives and which therefore merited (demanded) special nurturing and reward, including, somewhat contradictorily, via public policy. These, understood in entirely de-contextualised ways, included self-reliance and (emotional) resilience, personal confidence and ambition. Also systematically resurrected within Conservative educational policies after 2015 and given strong intellectual support by one of Prime Minister David Cameron’s closest advisors Paul Oginsky ³ was the notion of ‘character’ .

Within neo-liberal thinking, the corollary of this affirmation of the individual and individual responsibility was an at least implicit but sometimes quite explicit denial of wider and deeper structural inequalities and their impacts on those individuals’ life chances. In this analysis, the ways in which those lives continued in often crucial ways to be determined by class , gender , race , sexual orientation and (as so many young people discovered) age remained largely unacknowledged. Indeed, the possible consequences of these inequalities—of poor educational achievement, failures to get a well paid job and, for up to a third of those born between 1980 and 1996, the prospect of living in rented accommodation all their lives ⁴ —were often rebranded as evidence of inadequate individuals or, at its widest, dysfunctional family relationships.

The neo-liberal promotion of individualistic, privatised and competitive values also delegitimised a collective pursuit of shared goals, not least because such collectivities were seen as obstructing the market’s freedoms. This was perhaps exemplified particularly starkly by increasing restrictions on trade union action and by legal constraints imposed on charities ’ pre-election campaigning and lobbying. ⁵

All this also indicated another of the far-reaching consequences of neo-liberal policies: the systematic weakening of the independence of those charities—of that ‘ungoverned space’ within civil society which constitutes a defining feature of democracy in action. Starting under New Labour, these organisations increasingly found themselves pressured (even contractually required) to work in the ‘corporate’ ways favoured by neo-liberalism . This could include developing ‘business plans’, adopting ‘new managerialist ’ staff structures and redesigning themselves as ‘social enterprises’ generating profits to fund their activities. In return for getting what state funding remained, more of them also to took on policies and agendas with government-defined priorities including requirements to ‘measure’ their ‘impacts’ in statistical ways. ⁶

A powerful negative driver of these policies was the assumption that state bodies were intrinsically bureaucratic and hidebound and so operationally inefficient and not cost-effective—or, as a House of Commons Education Select Committee put it in 2011, that ‘the Government as default provider … stifles competition and innovation …’ ⁷ The Coalition government , in its first Treasury Spending Review in October 2010, made it clear that, for a wide range of social, health , justice and youth services , it would ‘… look at setting proportions of appropriate services across the public sector that should be delivered by independent providers….’ ⁸ As well as applying these perspectives directly, the period’s ‘austerity’ policies , though repeatedly explained as unavoidable for economic reasons, also acted as cover for reducing the role of the state. With philanthropic bodies expected to fill many of the resultant gaps in services , these as a citizen’s right were thus replaced, implicitly if not always explicitly, by a growing entitlement presumption by the wealthy and powerful that it was for them to decide who was ‘deserving’ and of what. Though governments made much of the need for ‘partnership’ and ‘collaboration’ , a k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Mapping and Contextualising the Territory: 2007–2018
• Part I. The New Labour Legacies
• Part II. Austerity Bites
• Part III. Wider Youth Policy Agendas
• Part IV. Youth Policies in Action
• Part V. Training and Qualifying for Work with Young People
• Part VI. Beyond Deconstruction
• Back Matter