If social mobility is to work in the UK, the government must abandon its ‘get on your bike’ mentality

We have agency and control about our economic future: the current economic model has kept people behind, rather than simply left them behind

On this day last year, every commissioner on the government’s social mobility commission resigned in protest at the lack of progress towards a fairer Britain. With Brexit negotiations and their associated politics all-consuming, Alan Milburn, the outgoing chair, described the government as “unable to devote the necessary energy and focus to the social mobility agenda”. Social mobility had been left to the interests of individual ministers, and the leadership needed for an effective cross-government initiative had evaporated.

A reconstituted commission led by Dame Martina Milburn, formerly chief executive of the Prince’s Trust, will relaunch next week, and it is vital that this time is different.

Young people today are set to have lower incomes than their parents’ generation. Relative mobility – or the different outcomes between individuals of the same generation dependent on parental background – has declined in the UK over the course of the 21st century. The destinies of the cohort born in the late 1950s were far less fixed than those of the cohort born in the early 1970s.

But justice demands that living standards are not determined by class, or accident of birth; and lack of progress on this can have damaging political consequences. While public debate and policy-making capacity has been subsumed by the delivery of Brexit, less attention has been paid to the underlying causes of the vote and the fissures in our society, along the lines of economic opportunity, that it revealed.

For the new commission to be effective, the government must learn from the lessons of previous cross-government initiatives, and provide it with real teeth across departments, led from the top.

The commission itself must interrogate why previous policy attempts have failed to deliver progress. But more challengingly, it must also question the common understanding of social mobility as providing people of different backgrounds an equal chance of the top roles. Twenty years of concerted but ultimately failed effort on social mobility should lead us to scrutinise the value of the concept, and also consider what it is that we’re really interested in. IPPR has today published a collection of essays from academic experts, campaigners and former government advisers on each of these points.

Social mobility is an outcome of a fairer economy, not an input into it. The societies with the least equal income distributions are also the societies with the least social mobility. Attempts to increase social mobility to generate a fairer economy will therefore always fall short on their own. Instead, what’s required is a reworking of the economy such that justice isn’t something that’s achieved after the fact, but is instead hard-wired into how the economy operates.

First, we need a more balanced economy, so that everyone can live in an area where there are opportunities. That includes an industrial strategy not just for a handful of leading edge sectors but for the everyday economy – the large employment, low productivity sectors such as retail or social care – as well as regional economic decision making and retraining for workers displaced by automation. We must abandon the “get on your bike” mentality: place and relationships matter, and it cannot be right that to succeed, people must leave the places where they and their families are rooted.

Second, we need more good quality, well-paid and secure jobs. Rather than only helping a few people to the top, policy should aim to narrow the difference between different jobs. That requires supporting investment in and the adoption of automating technologies to improve productivity and wages – but workers must also be partners in that process, to receive their proper share of the gains.

Third, we need to look beyond income to assets. As total wealth in the UK has grown, the cash gap between the haves and the have-nots has increased, placing the “good life” out of reach for those without large inheritances. It cannot be just that in the modern economy, inheritance is increasingly the route to security and opportunity, while others who work hard cannot have the same.

We must instead look to policies that reduce wealth inequality, including replacing council tax (which is deeply regressive) with better property taxes, and a lifetime gift tax on those who are given capital sums, making it harder for the wealthiest to pass their assets along, tax free, before they die.

Accepting that there must be permanent poverty and lower life chances for some parts of society reflects a paucity of political imagination. We have agency and control about our economic future: the current economic model has kept people behind, rather than simply left them behind.

The commission under Dame Milburn must be expansive in both its conception and ambition for social mobility, and it must be armed with real influence across government. We can bridge the gap between the country we are and the country we would wish to be. The first step is to have the vision and ambition to do so.

Carys Roberts is senior economist at IPPR