Equality of Opportunity: South-East Wakefield

Jon Trickett Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered increasing equality of economic opportunities in south east Wakefield.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Gary. I thank the House authorities for allowing me to raise a very important matter that relates to my constituency. I am aware of a certain event in another part of Wakefield on Thursday. Members will no doubt be listening carefully to ensure I avoid mentioning such matters, and I undertake to do so. I am most concerned to raise issues affecting the part of my constituency that I have described as south-east Wakefield. It is more or less, but not entirely, coterminous with the constituency of Hemsworth, which I have represented for over 26 years now.

Prompted in part by Government rhetoric about levelling up, I want to show how areas such as the one I represent are desperately in need of a new deal. Let me first tell Members about a conversation I had the other day with a young man named Zac Gaskell, 12 years old. He came along to see me with his dad Lee. Zac is an elected member of the Youth Parliament for our area. It was a great privilege to meet him. I asked him how he had come to be elected and what was in his manifesto. He said, “Well, the most important thing is that people in power need to listen to the voices of young people. After all, we—young people—are the future.” I agree with him; I am sure we all do.

The truth is that opportunities for young people in south-east Wakefield are severely limited. The situation is becoming dire. Having carefully read much of the Government’s information about levelling up, I have come to the conclusion that there is something missing. If we are going to talk about levelling up, what the country needs is some kind of analytical tool to guide us and by which we can measure the success or failure of the Government in achieving greater equality of economic opportunity for areas such as south-east Wakefield.

I believe there is such an analytical tool, lying easily to hand, that the country should use. These days, we call it social mobility. It used to be assumed that the next generation—the Zacs of this world—would get a better life than our generation. I think that is probably what brought most of us into politics: the idea that we could improve the way the country and the world operate. Some people call it the British promise, and we often now call it social mobility. With an increasingly centralised Government focused around Whitehall and the Cities of Westminster and London, it is no longer the case that this British promise of a better life will be delivered for areas such as south-east Wakefield.

Areas like mine are being held back. I want to show why, and speak about how and what we might do to think about changing the life chances of people I represent. My constituency is among the least socially mobile in the whole of England. There are 533 constituencies in England and mine is the fourth worst for social mobility; we are the 529th out of 533 seats. The Government have acknowledged the wider problem. I think that is why the idea of levelling up has been developed, and why the Government have appointed a Social Mobility Commission and now a social mobility tsar.

If the Government cannot offer assistance to a constituency like mine, we know that the model they are using does not work. What is curious about the commission is that the whole lot of them resigned back in 2020, as Members may remember. The commission said that inequality in Britain is

“now entrenched from birth to work.”

Certainly, that is a description of the area I represent. The new social mobility tsar, Katharine Birbalsingh, has said that working-class kids should maybe not aim so high. Indeed, last week she said that we should stop fixating on getting poor children to university—an extraordinary thing to say—and encourage them instead to celebrate “smaller steps” up the ladder. That is just not good enough. Is that the best that the Government’s appointee can say to Zac and his friends? “Don’t aim high, Zac. Take a few small steps. That is maybe all you can expect.”

What does such advice mean in practice? It means that a child born into a certain group in my constituency or elsewhere will likely die in the same social group that they, their parents and grandparents were part of. The ability to move up the ladder is negligible in an area like mine, and the situation is getting worse. Social mobility and deprivation levels are interconnected. My area is becoming more deprived as this Tory Government have gone on, not less. For example, we are now the 111th most deprived of the English constituencies. In 2015, we were the 130th, so we have declined by 19 positions. That is probably not surprising given that deprivation is growing, and it relates to the lack of social mobility in our area.

I pay tribute to the people in my area. They work hard; they were the miners who powered and lit our country, and did all the things necessary in the worst conditions imaginable at work. They are wonderful people. I guess we all think that about our own constituents, but in my case it is the truth. There are many companies in my area, some led by ex-miners, that want to help. They are exemplary, and rooted in the local community. Many leaders of those companies have a social conscience and want to bring social mobility back to life, give local people more opportunities and reverse the trends in deprivation, but they desperately need help and support.

I hope the council will put in bids for levelling-up funds that could help locally. If we are successful, it is to be welcomed, but if we are going to give the kids in Wakefield a chance, we need the Government to address the issues that are interconnected with deprivation and a lack of social mobility. I want briefly to touch on four or five of those issues. The first is productivity. These day, we measure productivity per head by something called GVA—gross value added. In Yorkshire and the Humber, gross value added per worker is just over £21,000, whereas in London it is £48,000, so the productivity per head in Yorkshire as a whole—it is slightly worse in my constituency—is £27,000 a year less than for workers in London, and that is because of lack of investment. Without investment, work will be less productive, and if the productivity of each worker is lower, we can therefore expect wages to be lower.

Average pay in Hemsworth is £495 a week. In the Prime Minister’s constituency, it is £728 a week. On average, the workers in Hemsworth in my constituency are paid £12,000 a year less than those in the Prime Minister’s constituency. What is worse is that earnings in Hemsworth have grown by 6% since 2010. In the UK, that growth in wages was 22%—almost four times more. I relate that back to the lack of investment in productivity. We are falling further behind. We can see the problems in our area, both chronic and acute, and we desperately need investment.

That brings me to my third point: the need to be mobile in an area where the place of work is no longer the local village. I represent 23 former colliery villages, and the work used to be located in each village. Now that work has gone, people have to travel some distance to get to decent employment, but the problem is that a quarter of people in my constituency do not have access to a car, and public transport—including rail and bus routes—is being cut back. I deliberately placed my office in a station, so people who do not have a car can get there, but the train service is being cut to that very station. From May this year, Northern Rail has cut services, including the links to Sheffield and Leeds, where there are jobs.

The same has happened with buses. I guess all of us who represent rural areas know that the bus services are in decline—in my area, severe decline. Seven routes with weekend timetables have been cut and 29 routes with weekday timetables have been affected. On top of that—perhaps because of it—transport spending in Yorkshire is a third of that spent per head in London. If we compare the £906 per head spent in London to the £300-odd in Yorkshire, that means we need £86 billion overall to be on par with London. How will we get geographic mobility, and the connected social mobility, if so many people do not have cars and public transport is reduced as I have described?

The Minister may have something about High Speed 2 in her briefing notes, but the eastern leg—through Yorkshire, up to Leeds—has been cut, although I think £100 million has been left to see whether we can build an inter-urban link between Sheffield and Leeds. The fact is that HS2 would drive a corridor as wide as two motorways through my constituency, but provide no stations or halts there. We would have all the pain, but none of the gain. HS2 is not a solution. We need proper interconnectivity, and I am sure many other Members would say the same about their constituencies. In areas with declining social mobility and increasing deprivation, public transport is imperative.

That brings me to a further point about the cuts as a result of austerity. Since 2015, Wakefield Council has suffered cuts of £57 million in real terms. The Minister may say, “Well, there is £20 million in levelling-up funds,” but that £20 million, which would be welcome, is being funded by the very cuts suffered by the public services in our area. It is not as though this is new money; it is money that has been recycled from cuts.

The cuts to school funding in our area are particularly painful. My constituency has lost almost £400 per pupil. When the social mobility tsar says to kids in my area, “Just take a few steps, but don’t dream of going to university,” the truth is that only small steps are possible because of cuts to schools. I take exception and offence to the advice given to people like Zac.

My final point is about digital exclusion. We all know that the economy is changing before our eyes and a new industrial revolution is well on its way, with more to come with artificial intelligence and all the other prospects available to us, but connectivity to the internet, which is so important to building a lively cultural and economic life in a constituency, is restricted in the south-east of Wakefield. The broadband speeds are among the worst in the whole country. Three quarters of communities in my area are in the worst 30% of areas for broadband connectivity.

The average download speed in Hemsworth is 52 Mbps, but in the Prime Minister’s constituency it is twice as high at 107 Mbps. It is not acceptable that communities should be left behind in this way by public transport, cuts and the other things I have described. Wherever we look, we are being held back. We need an active Government who will: secure investment; increase productivity; address the problems of geographic mobility as a result of the cuts to public transport; restore the service cuts, particularly in schools, which I feel passionate about; and invest in broadband. We need a Government who will offer real opportunities to local business leaders who want to root themselves back in the community, who recognise the value of a loyal and hard-working workforce, and who want to give people a chance to restore the kind of life they had before the mines were closed all those years ago. All those steps could and would improve opportunity in our area. I just hope the Government are listening, although sometimes I doubt they are.

Let me finish on a bigger question. South-east Wakefield has issues that require active government, not the small government that the Chancellor is always rabbiting on about. That is also the case in many other communities across the country, especially in the wake of the covid pandemic, but the issues I have described show how chronic and acute the problems are in south-east Wakefield. That ought to lead us to pose a bigger question: can the current neoliberal economic model and the ossified, over-centralised state frameworks really deliver social justice? I do not believe they can.

Levels of inequality are now verging on the obscene in parts of our country. The richest people in society have increased their wealth by £700 billion since the crash, yet for people in my constituency, wages and salaries are declining or stagnating. The cost of living is skyrocketing and public services are becoming overstretched. Within this national context, it is perhaps unsurprising that areas like mine have been held back for so long. Although the idea of levelling-up money is to be welcomed—we will bid for it and I will engage with it—we need to recognise that nothing less than a full-scale economic system change and proper devolution of power will do, so that people who make decisions can understand their impact on local people. That does not happen now.

Long ago, I came to the conclusion that the economic, cultural, political and social distances between decision makers here in the capital and areas such as south-east Wakefield are so vast as to ensure that there will be no progress towards social justice in our area without radical change. That is because the decision makers are so remote from life as it is lived by the people I represent. I represent middle England, right in the middle of the country—people who work hard, play by the rules, pay their taxes, and yet are being left behind. I leave this final thought with the Minister: can she convincingly say to the young people of my area, like Zac, that the status quo, with all its structural problems, can really offer the change that south-east Wakefield requires? I do not believe so.