Why are the young caught in the cross-hairs of this government? That will mystify future social historians. Most societies talk of them as “our future”, to be nurtured and encouraged, but in yesterday’s budget, yet again they were pursued in a special vendetta of dislike, bordering on disgust.

Perry fits most of the criteria for the image of a disreputable young person to be starved into shape – though his only crime is to be born. He’s 20 and lives in a YMCA hostel in Burton-on-Trent. He is one of six children, and that’s become almost a crime in itself, now benefits are being withdrawn from any family with more than two – if they’re low-paid. (Cameron has three children, Iain Duncan Smith four.) He comes from a “broken home”, crime number two. When he was 10 his mother took off with a new man who beat her up and took against Perry. Home life was turbulent and he missed a lot of school. His mother took to drinking, and after rows, he was eventually thrown out and can’t go back. So now he relies on housing benefit – crime number three – which has just been axed for under-21s in the budget.

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He has sofa-surfed with friends and slept rough, until, traumatised and lonely, he reached this safe haven, where he is being helped to recover and get himself into work. “When I moved into the YMCA I had really bad depression and anxiety,” he says. “I was in a bad way. Apart from going to the jobcentre, I pretty much didn’t leave my room at all for a month or two.”

He was going for an interview the day I talked to him, but wants to go back to college to pick up his missed education and become a computer and mobile phone repair technician. Painfully shy and unsure of himself at first, now he’s tenant representative at the hostel.

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He is one of 19,894 under-21s on jobseeker’s allowance who claim housing benefit, which until yesterday was costing the state £128m a year. The government will still pay for those who have children, leaving 17,689 to be cut adrift to fend for themselves with nowhere to live. Housing benefit pays £220 a week to keep Perry there – but the Burton YMCA doesn’t know how it will manage to keep the 34 under-21s in its care without that money. Mediators help get young people back to their families where possible, about 40 a year here, saving the state.

In his lonely travels, Perry has met lots more like him. Even if specialist hostels get a dispensation – nothing in the small print says so yet – most of those cut adrift will be on the streets without housing benefit. They aren’t living the high-life in flats: previous benefit cuts made sure under-35s can only rent a room. On the streets they are vulnerable and may be forced into crime: if so, that £220 a week housing benefit looks good value compared with the £170 a night cost of a youth offender institution. When the young were cut off from housing benefit by Margaret Thatcher in the 80s, they poured out onto the streets in cardboard cities, highly visible and politically embarrassing. Research from Heriot-Watt University suggests the social costs – health, crime, mental problems – mean this petty meanness will barely even save any money.

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Of the young people cast off housing benefit, Shelter, the homeless charity, says, 61% currently live in social housing, with 39% renting privately. Under 24s are almost three times more likely to be unemployed than the general population: without a home, no chance of a job.

This cut is such a gratuitous blow, a political gesture designed to imply there is a generation living off the fat of the state because they prefer it to living with boring parents. Jobseeker’s allowance is being removed from the young too, putting them on a new youth obligation scheme instead. Worst of all, the new higher minimum wage won’t apply to the under 25s – the ones most likely to be on starvation wages. But only 0.6% of 18 to 21-year-olds are on both housing benefit and jobseeker’s allowance, and all the research shows these are mainly abandoned and dislocated young people like Perry.

In his time, Osborne has stripped the young of education maintenance allowances, shrunk tax credits, child benefits, upped tuition fees, cut further education colleges and careers advice while stripping away youth services. But above all, he and his party have monstered the young. Nice young people now stay home until their 30s, unable to find housing. Nice families stay together forever. The children of the rest are blamed and punished.