Social Mobility

Mike Crockart Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mike Crockart (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I thank the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) and the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) for securing this important debate and for giving me my first opportunity to speak about social mobility since becoming one of the vice-chairs of the all-party social mobility group.

It is entirely appropriate that the debate takes place in Westminster Hall, as it was here, nearly 500 years ago, that King Henry VIII’s closest aide came to put a Bill for the relief of the poor before Parliament. The causes of poverty listed in that Bill included unemployment and bad upbringing. It provided for a works programme that compelled the able-bodied to work on projects such as road building, maintenance of fortresses and harbours and cleansing of watercourses, in return for a fair wage. Even child beggars were to be hired as apprentices to skilled craftsmen, offering them a chance of a future that they would otherwise never have had. The proposals were radical, but that quality was perhaps more pronounced because they were the brainchild of Thomas Cromwell, who was the King’s chief Minister, Earl of Essex and Master of the Rolls—but also the son of a blacksmith from Putney.

We should be clear about what we mean by social mobility. We are not talking about creating equality of income, or equality of experience. Our aim is to achieve equality of opportunity and a society in which individuals who grow up in poorer families can use their talent and effort to move up the socio-economic ladder. The problem is that people from low-income backgrounds find it extremely difficult to get on in life through education and employment. Now, as in 1535, poverty is the greatest barrier to social mobility and equality.

The all-party group’s report on social mobility showed that the prospects of half of all children born in the UK can be almost entirely linked to their parents’ socio-economic circumstances. Perhaps contrary to outward perception and certainly counter to the American dream, America and Britain have the highest intergenerational correlations between the social status of fathers and sons—47% in America and 50% in the UK, whereas, by comparison, in Denmark it is just 15% and in Australia 17%. I have no doubt that that is in large part down to educational attainment.

The BBC 1 programme “Who Do You Think You Are?” has sparked many people’s interest in examining their backgrounds and finding out about their predecessors—often with surprising results. I, too, have looked into my predecessors. I found it quite easy, helped by the fact that my father, Robert Crockart, had a father named Robert George Crockart, whose father was Robert Crockart—you can guess the rest, Mr Rosindell. My father was born in Methven, a small village outside Perth, and I have traced his direct predecessors back almost 400 years to the 1600s, when they all worked manually on the land around Methven, so there was no degree of geographic mobility, never mind social mobility—yet here I stand. The only difference is education and my being the first in my family to achieve a degree—and not even that good a degree, it has to be said. That is only one example, but one that I am sure is repeated many hundreds of times across the country. That is why I regard access to education and especially higher education as key in this debate.

Two days ago, as part of my party’s attempts to increase representative diversity, I was shadowed by a potential Liberal Democrat candidate from a poor background, who blogged about the experience afterwards and reminded me of a certain quote:

“I believe that access to higher education is a key enabler of social mobility and the best way to narrow the gap between the richest and poorest in society.”

It is a wonderful quote. It is from me. I do not want to open old wounds, but those words were written in my letter of resignation from Government over the increase in tuition fees. I did so not because of any pledge, but because of a personal understanding that knowing that a figure indicated a contingent liability rather than an actual debt was a differentiation that would be lost on many young people from backgrounds like mine.

Nevertheless, I think the Government are right to view the problem more widely and to take a life-cycle approach by examining issues and interventions from the early years all the way through to adulthood.

[The Minister for Universities and Science (Mr David Willetts)]

The hon. Gentleman rightly expresses the anxieties that people had at the time of our tuition fee and loan proposals. Does he take some encouragement from the UCAS evidence that applications from school leavers and 18-year-olds at college have barely fallen? Indeed, we are running at the second highest rate of applications ever, and, in particular, we cannot find any differential fall in applications. If anything, applications from young people from low-income backgrounds have held up slightly better than those from other groups.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Crockart]

I accept what my right hon. Friend is saying. The difficulty was always selling the detail of the proposals. I looked at the detail of the measures and there was much there to commend them and much improvement on what was there before. My worry was that this large amount known as a debt would turn people off. If that has not happened, because of the huge efforts made by many hon. Members in this place and elsewhere, that is to be welcomed, but it was a huge concern at the time.

Lots of other proposals are going ahead, such as universal credit and the Work programme, which the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has said:

“have the potential to really move things on…and to provide a better basis to help people into work.”

I hope that our policies to ensure that the tax system is fairer will also play their part in lessening the gap between the richest and poorest. Other initiatives coming from the youth contract aim to provide secure, fairly paid jobs for people with the real prospect of progression.

At this point, I have to state that I stand here a repentant sinner. On arrival at Westminster with a very tight budget and an unforgiving Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority standing behind me, I did what everyone else was doing and took on unpaid interns. However, my actions sat increasingly uncomfortably with me. Despite the quality and easy supply of people, it was simply indefensible to me to give opportunity in such a way that only a small minority of people were able to take advantage of it. I now have two paid apprentices, both of whom are sitting in the Public Gallery today: one is from the Speaker’s parliamentary placement scheme and one from the parliamentary academy’s new deal of the mind. I urge all hon. Members here and others who read Hansard tomorrow to find out about such schemes to widen opportunities to people who, because of their background, would not normally be able to take up positions here. As I say, those people could not be here if they were not paid. The good side of that is that my conscience is now at peace once again.

I am doing what I can to help in my constituency. A similar scheme to that outlined by the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles has joined with the Department for Work and Pensions, Skills Development Scotland and Edinburgh Guarantee, which is run by the local council, to work with approximately 50 employers so far to create 100 paid training places for young people in 100 days. Youth contract funding makes such initiatives possible, and I urge hon. Members to get involved.

As the report on the seven key truths about social mobility states, the fact remains that

“the point of greatest leverage is at 0-3.”

Things such as a child’s development score at just 22 months can serve as an accurate predictor of educational outcomes at 26 years of age. Boys deemed to be at risk by nurses were two and a half times as likely to have criminal convictions as those in the not-at-risk group by the age of 21. It is clear that we must do much more to identify those at risk, intervene and ensure that they reach their potential.

I am anxious to allow the person speaking after me to have the full 10 minutes, so I will skip ahead and sum up by saying that social mobility is not only a matter of justice or fairness to individuals. Our country as a whole would benefit massively from increasing the fluidity of our society. When people are excluded from opportunities because of their background, we waste their talent and potential to contribute to our society in a meaningful way. We also risk being hugely out of touch with the majority of people if politicians, chief executives, judges, leading business figures and civil servants all have similar backgrounds, life experience and beliefs. Ninety per cent of MPs elected in 2010—my intake—went to university, and more than a third of them attended either Oxford or Cambridge. That contrasts with the general population: according to 2010 figures, only 31% of working-age adults in England were educated to university level.

In the 21st century, we are still discussing the issue that Thomas Cromwell’s draft Bill sought to address—changing the life chances of those born into poverty. Let this Parliament tackle the lack of social mobility in the UK with the same revolutionary zeal that he did—although perhaps without the beheading. Today’s debate is a good start.