Social Mobility

Justin Madders Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

Social mobility ought to concern us all. I am not comfortable living in a country where the chances of success are heavily influenced by where someone is born and who they are to. The Sutton Trust’s report “Elites in the UK: Pulling Away?” found that one in five men in professional occupations who were born between 1955 and 1961 became socially mobile, but the figure drops to one in eight for those born between 1975 and 1981. In other words, as generations go by, we are becoming a less mobile nation.

When I was chair of the all-party parliamentary group on social mobility, we did a report on access to professions, including medicine, law, politics, media and art. Those are the areas where the lack of opportunity is most prevalent. Three quarters of senior judges, more than half the top 100 news journalists, more than half the Cabinet and two thirds of British Oscar winners are privately educated. We have already heard the statistic that someone is 24 times more likely to be in medicine if their parents are already in it.

Our report is six years old but just as relevant today. I would really like to see some of the practical recommendations in it implemented, such as a ban on unpaid internships, which really take the ladder away from many who are trying to get on the first rung. Exploitation is taking place at entry level.

Drama is one area where opportunities are limited. I should point out, for the record, that my son is an aspiring actor and uses some of the services I am about to mention. I mention them because they are a new way of exploiting young people’s ambitions. Most acting jobs now are hidden behind paywalls, costing anywhere from £15 and £19 a month to access. What kind of world do we live in where someone has to pay a subscription just to see whether there are any jobs they might want to apply for?

There are three companies that seem to operate in this way: Spotlight, Mandy and StarNow, which I see regularly advertising on social media. I say three companies advisedly, because Backstage and StarNow seem to have almost identical websites, and Mandy and StarNow have the same registered office and similar directors. Perhaps I am missing something about why I need to have three separate subscriptions. In their defence, they say:

“Having memberships to the multiple platforms will give you access to the most job opportunities and increase your visibility to casting”.

That sounds reasonable enough, but I suggest it would also be reasonable to put all the jobs on one site and not charge at all. We can debate the morality of this business model another time, but I wonder whether the Minister thinks it is right for a profession that is notoriously difficult to access to be exploiting people and charging them just to look at what jobs are available.

I conclude by asking the Minister another question about where social mobility lies in the Government’s list of priorities. As we have heard, if social mobility is to be tackled properly, we need to tackle more than just access to work. It is about tax, welfare, housing, transport and health. At the very least, it should not be the remit of just one Minister in one Department; it should be a central mission across all Departments. If the Government are serious about tackling injustice and widening opportunity, it must be driven from the very top.