Social Mobility Committee Report

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, it was indeed a privilege to serve on this committee. I, too, am grateful to the many people who gave evidence to us and to the committee staff, Luke Hussey, Emily Greenwood and Morgan Sim, who responded to my numerous requests, often at the last minute. I view the Government’s response as an introduction, as our report ran to nearly 140 pages and the response is only 11 pages of very widely spaced text with large margins. I hope the Minister will agree to meet interested members of the committee to discuss the detailed report in more depth.

I came through the academic route from school—A-levels at sixth-form college, university and then a pupillage in Kings Chambers in Manchester—to become a practising barrister, but from a background of parents who worked all their lives in a factory. I was therefore not hugely conversant with what I now know to be the vocational route, but you soon learn that if you are to get that elusive tenancy as a barrister you need to impress not only your fellow barristers, your pupil mistress, the head of chambers, if you come across them, and those solicitors who give you work, but also the clerks. Clerks then had usually joined chambers at 16 as a runner, and then had a junior role in the clerks’ room before becoming a junior clerk and rising up the ranks. They were vocationally very talented as salespeople and negotiators and were incredibly business-savvy. Even after you were taken on as a barrister, you soon knew if they were not pleased with you when the work given to you as a junior barrister involved travelling from Manchester all the way to Pontefract or Hull for a 10-minute hearing.

Looking back, there was a clear career progression for clerks, and they were deservedly highly respected. They had not picked up any of the social conditioning that Mr Tony Moloney of National Grid described to the committee in his evidence, which said that,

“if you do not go to university you have failed”.

Besides being wrong as an attitude, this would mean that the majority of our young people have failed as the majority do not go on to higher education or become NEETs. The majority—the committee debated many labels for this group but settled on simply “the majority” to get this simple point home—go into further education, work or apprenticeships.

I will not be able to do justice to the enormous amount of evidence we heard as I make four brief key points. They are, first, looking at ourselves, then a simple system, then flexibility and, finally, a new vision for the majority. Let us begin here at home, looking at ourselves, the House, Members and the Civil Service. I commend wholeheartedly the recent introduction by the House of Lords of apprenticeships that will provide high-quality entry-point careers to young people within the administration of this workplace. The committee met the head of the House of Lords staff privately, and I am very pleased to see this development. With regard to Members of your Lordships’ House, I recognise that it can be difficult to provide work, or even work experience, when many of us are part-time and have few support staff, but I know that many noble Lords wish to give back and to provide opportunities, which is why a group of us will be writing to the Lord Speaker to ask him to look at the viability of running a formal work experience scheme here. This would seem an obvious next step from Peers’ outreach to schools and, combined with the contacts gained by Parliament’s excellent Education Service, there must surely be a network to advertise and recruit for a meritocracy-based work-experience scheme here.

Also close to home is the Civil Service scheme, which I have raised in your Lordships’ House previously and about which I was in correspondence with my noble friend Lord Bridges under the previous Government. If I understand correctly—and I read his letter very carefully—there are high-quality apprenticeships in the Civil Service, but you cannot join the fast track at the age of 18 on an apprenticeship. You have to transfer in later on. Why? We received evidence that you can join Deloitte, National Grid or M&S and be on the path to the top from the start. In fact, they were clear in their evidence that senior managers, even directors, of M&S and National Grid began as apprentices. The noble Lord, Lord Stone of Blackheath, who ran Marks & Spencer, joined from being a market trader in Pontypridd. Sir John Parker, who former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher asked to run Harland and Woolf and who turned it around between 1983 and 1993, joined that company as an apprentice and went on to be president of the Royal Academy of Engineering. You can join the British Army as an officer at 18, so why not the Civil Service? Such embedding of the lack of parity of esteem for graduate entry against those who enter at 18 undermines the stated view of Her Majesty’s Government that vocational and academic routes are equal in value. I hope the Minister will be able to inform your Lordships’ House today that the fast track is being reviewed to sort this matter out lest talented young people be deterred from applying.

My second point is about simplicity. Our report recommends a system along the lines of the UCAS system so that the majority of students have a simple access point with the relevant information about various vocational qualifications, careers and earnings. This recommendation is repeated in the State of the Nation 2016 report by the Social Mobility Commission, and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that of all the recommendations, it should be a priority for the Government. I was going to say that the current system is complicated, fragmented and so on, but it is not actually a system. It really is not if you try to engage with it. It needs coherence. It sets too many young people up to start on the wrong route. Too many young people spend a year doing the wrong vocational course or starting A-levels and then needing to switch. If at this point they find the right route for them, that year can have funding implications for their study as the next two years may fall partly under the adult education budget, apparently partly depending on their birthday. I confess I never felt confident that I fully understood the complexities of the funding arrangements for the 16 to 19 cohort. Some simplicity, as with UCAS, is urgently needed.

My third point is about flexibility. In this regard, I shall refer first to a case that struck me and other members of the committee: young people who are carers. A charity facilitated discussions with young people. A lady in her early 20s, whom we met, had been thwarted in her career choice as her caring responsibilities, which she had borne most of her life, entitled her to carer’s allowance. She wanted to be a midwife, but that was a full-time course. Although she could have done the time around her caring responsibilities, the inflexibility of the system meant she would lose her carer’s allowance. She was allowed to undertake only a part-time course, and midwifery was a full-time course in her rural, east-coast location. Many noble Lords, including the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, rightly champion the situation of care leavers, but we hear much less about young people who are carers. Will the Minister confirm that this issue, which is specifically raised in our report, will be investigated by Her Majesty’s Government and/or the Social Mobility Commission to look at proposed solutions?

Another point is about flexibility and self-critique by employers to ensure their recruitment is open to all. I found the evidence from Mr Moloney of National Grid and Ms Codd from Deloitte in October 2015 most compelling. National Grid not only focuses on trying to recruit ex-offenders, which is admirable enough, but has also sought to reach young people with learning disabilities, of whom only 7% get into employment, although 70% of them gain employment from the programme in the firm. Deloitte has gone to great lengths to recruit 200—rising soon to 400—people at the age of 18 on a level playing field.

Ms Codd’s evidence is worth quoting to your Lordships, as it gives some indication of the depth Deloitte has gone to in order to achieve that level playing field. She said that,

“the BrightStart scheme … has five components, and we have looked at each of those components thoroughly over the past two years to make sure that the playing field is completely level and we are not inadvertently favouring anybody from middle or upper socioeconomic backgrounds. For example, we still set a requirement for 260 UCAS points. However, when we look at academics we contextualise that now, so it is about looking at the background within which any achievement was attained. We have also introduced blind CVs when it comes to institutions where individuals have studied to make sure that we can remove unconscious bias … we have moved away from a competency-based interview to an interview that focuses more on values, because again we realised that if we focused on competency, as in, ‘Give us an example of when you did something’, that was inadvertently disadvantaging those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds”.

It is taking this to its suppliers and clients. Why? It is the right thing, but she also said it is a smart thing to do:

“For us it was a real business imperative. We want the right talent. We want the best, and the best does not necessarily have to come from a particular background”.

I hope it will be a key government priority to ensure that the new job creation we are witnessing in the digital economy is, again, open to all. I hope the Government will look at how high-tech start-ups are ensuring that there is a level playing field. This very new business model needs to ensure that it breaks the mould and is open to all.

Finally, even if all firms had the best procedures, our report recognises the deeply embedded cultural problem that vocational training is viewed as the poor relation. If we are to have shared—or some might say, British—values, we also need a vision for our country where every job counts and is valuable. Changing culture is about more than changing policy; it is about promoting different role models, particularly in the media. I join the right reverend Prelate in his concerns about the context of social mobility. It seems often to be portrayed as people only progressing up an already established class structure. What message are we sending to the hundreds of thousands of people we need to build homes or to care for older people? We need to return to a national vision that does not just value work on its income—although I accept that in some areas the wage needs to be raised to the living wage—but under which every person’s job is valuable, to bring about the cohesion that we all desire to see in 2016.