‘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.