Social Mobility

Jon Trickett Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. It was interesting to listen to the speech of the right hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett). He is right to emphasise social mobility, and I was very interested to hear him describe his background.

It is probably worth referring to my background. I was more or less told to leave school when I was 15. I left with no meaningful qualifications and I went to work as a manual worker in the building industry. I was encouraged by my grandfather to try to understand why the system had failed me or why I had failed the system. I became very curious about it, and eventually I went to a further education college. The right hon. Gentleman said he had been a college teacher, so no doubt he helped many people in my position. I eventually finished up at university.

My first reflection is this: the stepping stones that were available to me are no longer available to the same extent to the current generation. Further education has been cut to the bone and is simply not available at the scale that it was when I was younger, when I basically left school in some disgrace. The university system is now really a commodified form of education. I voted against the original idea to charge student fees—it was a mistake. I did it because I was thinking about people from my background. My grandad said to me, “The system doesn’t work for people like us.” That is a profound thing to have said, and I have spent almost all my life trying to understand what it is about “people like us” and why the system is not working properly for them.

The right hon. Gentleman has an optimistic view of social mobility in our society, perhaps because his constituency is the 51st most socially mobile in the whole country. There are 533 constituencies in England, and mine is the 529th most socially mobile, so he and I inhabit almost two different worlds. He is right to be passionate about this subject, but the truth of the matter is that the Conservative idea that there is real social mobility available for all who are able to make use of it is simply an ideological myth designed to gloss over the fact that our social structures are ossified and it is almost impossible to break though.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the Sutton Trust. The trust identified, out of the 60-odd million of us in this country, 6,000 people who run it; and two fifths of them went to public school, which is five times as many as average. I accept the right hon. Member did not go to public school; I do not know why I am looking at him—I will draw my attention elsewhere. The people who run this country, including this Parliament, tend to come from very privileged backgrounds. Not so many years ago, there were 100 manual workers in Parliament; now there are only seven of us left. There are 200 people with a business background in the House of Commons. If we look at almost every power structure in our society, the same thing applies—other than in professional sports, where more people from working-class backgrounds have access.

I will cut to the chase. There are 440,000 children living in poverty, despite that fact that their parents are working full-time, and yet Government Members and Ministers continually tell us that work is the way to opportunity in life. I believe in work. I am a member of a party called Labour; the Labour party is about work. We believe in work and want people to be at work. But do not tell me or my constituents that work is a route out of poverty. It is a route into poverty as much as any other system in our country.

In my constituency, there has been a 50% increase in the number of children in poverty since 2015. That is in one constituency. My constituency is also in the lowest 20% for young people’s educational attainment. Given the low levels of social mobility, and the levels of poverty and education in my constituency, it is impossible to imagine, how—without dramatic social and economic change—a child born there today can expect to do anything other than die younger than normal and in poverty. The whole idea of social mobility is a myth, unless it is combined with massive structural and transformative change. With that, I will take the hint that I have had my five minutes.