Social Mobility

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to take my noble friend Lord McFall’s question seriously and ask: what is the relationship between inequality and social mobility? There are often problems when a technical concept enters popular and political discourse, and that has certainly been the case with the notion of social mobility. There are many misunderstandings about it. If one does not sort them out, it is almost impossible to make proper policy.

For example, the idea has taken hold that there has been a serious decline in social mobility over the past three or four decades. To quote the Observer, social mobility “has ground to a halt”. It was this concern that prompted the Milburn report and a range of other publications. However, there are two problems with this view. First, it seems to be substantially false. It has been subjected to a powerful critique from John Goldthorpe and his colleagues at the University of Oxford. Secondly—I hope that noble Lords will forgive me for being an academic about this but it is essential—the current discussion of social mobility fails to grasp the crucial distinction which sociologists make between absolute and relative mobility. We cannot understand current patterns of mobility if we do not grasp that notion. It is an essential distinction to make.

Absolute mobility refers to the proportion of people from specific class backgrounds who move upwards: in other words, the number of people who move upwards. Relative social mobility is a very different notion. It is the one that many people equate with social mobility, but that is wrong. Relative social mobility means the chances of individuals becoming mobile. In other words, it is a measure of social fluidity. It refers, if you like, to some individuals succeeding at the expense of others. It means that if there are high levels of relative upward mobility, there must be high levels of downward mobility as well. They are two very different notions and we have to sort them out.

The results of Goldthorpe's work are interesting and instructive for policy. They show that rates of absolute mobility from one generation to another across the 20th century in the UK and elsewhere have actually been quite high and remain high. The reason is simple: there has been an expansion of white-collar and professional occupations at the expense of less skilled manual jobs. The main reason for the apparent fluidity of our society is that structural change has produced a lot more opportunities at the top. Goldthorpe also shows, interestingly, that relative mobility has remained static across that period. In other words, contrary to what one might assume, the UK did not become a more fluid society over the past 40 or 50 years; there was not more fluidity and movement. Almost all the movement was upward mobility going into the jobs that were created.

Of course, as the noble Lord, Lord McNally, described, individual capacities make a difference as to who gets into those positions. However, the dominant feature is structural mobility over that period not, if you like, a more just or equal society.

Obviously, that does not mean that the plethora of policies contained in the Milburn report are without value but, as Goldthorpe says, no matter how gratifying those policies may be, politically their impact is likely to be quite limited. He is right to say that. In other words, more advantaged groups are often able to draw on their resources to negate the policies introduced with the best of intentions for introducing more relative mobility. That is a serious issue for such policies. For example, you might introduce a policy to help kids from an inner-city school to get into a higher level of the system, but middle-class parents can easily mobilise to negate that because they are not stupid and they know what is going on, too. So there is a powerful dialectic in all of this.

The conclusion that I draw is similar to Goldthorpe’s conclusion, which is that we must place the emphasis on equality rather than mobility. Social mobility in everyday talk these days functions as a kind of relatively seemingly painless equivalent for equality. As the noble Lord, Lord McFall, stressed, equality comes first because without greater equality we cannot improve social mobility. Equality not only trumps mobility, it is the main source of achievement. I do not see what policies the Government have for limiting the structural inequalities that were so well defined in the opening speech of the noble Lord, Lord McFall.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Giddens]

The time when those organisations were dominant was a time when mobility was lower than it was later, for the reasons that I mentioned.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Yes, there was selective mobility, and that is part of the issue that we have. The noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, talked about her father and her grandmother. My parents-in-law were the youngest in a working class family and their eldest brothers and sisters paid for them to stay at school through Bradford grammar school and university. There was in those years very small-scale social mobility for a small minority of the bright poor who got out, so to speak.

[Lord Giddens]

That is much more like it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Precisely. Britain’s situation also reflects the historic anomaly, of which I am very conscious as I have just come from a meeting of the advisory board on the centenary of World War I and have been reading into early 20th century history, that we have much more continuity of social structures over the past 150 years than many of our comparators. We still have the structure of private schools, which supported the Empire. We still have an unelected House of Lords. We still have a social hierarchy which is remarkably resistant to change, whereas in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium and, to some extent, also in France and Italy those old structures were swept away, which made it easier to have a more mobile and mutually respecting society.

The coalition Government’s social mobility agenda is something which we see as a cross-party, cross-government exercise, and it starts from the assumption that there has to be a partnership between economy, society and state—we have to get all those things in balance. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, that we shall be working on that against a number of very difficult global economic trends and against the challenge of the next round of economic and technological change, which may well sweep away a very large number of basic white-collar jobs, thus raising all sorts of issues about moving towards a society in which there are a number of extremely successful, very well paid people and, at the other end, a number of poorly paid, poorly skilled people. Dealing with that will take quite a lot of effort in our turn.

I should tell the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, that when I was an undergraduate, my most inspirational teacher was a graduate student called John Goldthorpe, so I have a great deal of respect for everything that John has written and continues to write. However, as the noble Lord knows well, perfect equality is not achievable; a reduction in the degree of inequality is. That is, after all, what a liberal society should attempt to work for. This Government are mounting an attack on tax avoidance. We face the problem of what I have to call the rootless rich, who have escaped the boundaries of nation states and thus managed extremely successfully to avoid tax. We need taxes on wealth, which is much less mobile than income. At the bottom, we have increased the threshold at which people start to pay income tax. There is the move towards universal credit and in encouraging more people into work. We are extremely happy that the level of youth unemployment is now on a downward trend, and we are doing as much as we can to ensure that that continues.

International economic trends help us. The Financial Times had an interesting article yesterday which suggested that there is now a downward trend in excessive executive salaries after the excesses of the past 20 years. We are affected by what is happening elsewhere, and we have to push very hard to provide for our own deeply interdependent society as much of a social compact in the global economy as we can. I worry about the impact on British society and the British economy of the influx of the super-wealthy from non-democratic states. That ought to be of concern, particularly to all those who live in London and the south-east of England.

We have now reached the stage where we all realise that the state cannot deal with a problem like that alone; the state cannot provide everything and our taxpayers are unwilling to pay for much more of what is needed. They want the services, but they are deeply resistant to higher taxation, so we have to talk about the role of independent social initiatives—what I still like to call the big society—the role of local communities and local action. Incidentally, we have to think about planning and building communities which hang together. Living in Saltaire, which is a very dense village where it is impossible not to know your neighbours, and having canvassed when I was the local candidate for Shipley in a number of the new housing estates where you do not know your neighbours, the husband has gone out in the only family car and the wife is marooned on her own, I am very conscious that the way in which we build communities in Britain also deserves a great deal more attention. We need more local government and local engagement and, as we have said about other areas, we need to persuade more of the young to vote and become engaged, because we know that all our political parties are pooled towards supporting the old and not putting enough money into the young.

On equality of education, the Government are now extending the pupil premium. In September 2014 we will extend 15 free hours of high-quality early education to 40% of two year-olds—not an easy task when at the same time the number of two year-olds is rising quite sharply. We inherited Teach First from our predecessor Labour Government and we have continued to expand it. The Teach First teachers that I have seen in various schools in West Yorkshire are absolutely first-class. We all know from what the All-Party Group on Social Mobility has said that raising the quality of teaching is a very important part of all this. Intergenerational equity, putting more money into children at the early stage, is very much part of what we need to do.

The noble Lord, Lord McFall, also mentioned the professions. I have to say that the figures on professions are deeply worrying, and I hope that whichever Government come in next time will look in particular at the question of recruitment into the legal profession as the one that sticks out most strongly as an inherited one.

Aspiration, character and resilience are clearly extremely important; I think that we have all now gripped that. Providing children with a sense of self-worth through school, careers guidance, music, sports, volunteering and mentoring is important. I am an extremely strong supporter of the National Citizen Service; I am about to ask the Cabinet Office whether it will be willing to provide an introduction to the NCS to any Member of the House of Lords who would like to see it, because I became enthusiastic when I had seen one or two courses myself. Through partnership with business, the Government now have a business compact. The Deputy Prime Minister has just given Opening Doors awards to a number of businesses that have been extremely good at pulling people into work. Apprenticeships are important, and I have to say that the apprentice that we had in the Government Whips’ Office was a classic example—a young woman who had been a hairdresser, and had not thought that she could be anything else, who blossomed in the six months that she was with us. All these things help to give young people a greater sense that they can do things. That is a very large agenda.

As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby said, we have to be careful to get beyond the idea that it is all about everyone getting to the top. The importance of the apprenticeship schemes, which I am extremely proud of this Government expanding, is that they are giving a number of young people a sense of self-worth in craft skills. That is a revival of an old mutuality of respect that we clearly need to do. Unfortunately, we cannot provide the independent business that also used to be part of the business of respect. I come from four different families and my great-grandparents were all small shopkeepers, so I am incredibly petty bourgeois. The mutuality of respect is part of what we all now need to rebuild.

We are out of time but we could have debated this for a great deal longer. I thank the noble Lord for raising this issue, and I repeat: I hope that we will continue to address this subject as a very broad long-term issue for this country over the years to come.