The Youth Service and the Threat to Welfare

Abstract

The predicament of the Youth Service concerning its future capacity and purpose has, to an extent, been obscured for many practitioners by their perception of an overarching threat to the long-term stability and even survival of public sector welfare per se. With the determination of the Conservative Government elected in 1979 to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’ and to control and reduce public sector expenditure there was a understandable outpouring of anxiety amongst many practitioners and within agencies over the maintenance of funding levels within all branches of welfare. This was reflected within the Youth Service where the tenor of the early 1980s was generally one of despondency and nervousness concerning long-term prospects (Smith, 1980). A feeling that the statutory Service was ‘getting back to the 1950’s … when the Youth Service had diminished in some areas to the point of actually disappearing’ (Nichol, 1981, p. 13) was not uncommon. Certainly, like other welfare sectors the statutory Youth Service found it difficult to come to terms with often significant reductions in the size of budgets and rate-capping. The voluntary sector, much of which had become either partially or wholly dependent upon public funding, also found the lessons painful.