Social Mobility

Mike Kane Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. I welcome the Minister to her new role. I know from my time on the Front Bench that she takes a keen interest in education. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett) on securing the debate. He has a long-standing interest in this matter and has raised it on the Floor of the House on numerous occasions. I just hope that his colleagues at the top of the party will continue to listen. He is right that it is a moral argument, which was made crystal clear in his comments.

I am a First Generation ambassador for Manchester Metropolitan University and have trained numerous working-class young people at A-level about going to university for the first time. Several of them will visit Parliament in the next few weeks. We raise money from the private sector to help the programme, and I am proud of the work that I do as a constituency MP on this matter.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) mentioned social mobility. I have to say that I disagree with his saying that London is the economic and cultural capital of Great Britain. As a Manchester United fan, he should know better. However, it was an excellent speech. He said that opportunity has gone backwards and social mobility is going backwards. I thank him for his work in Parliament on this the subject.

The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell), as ever in education debates in Westminster Hall, made really good points about apprenticeships and how important they are to working-class communities getting on. I visited Airbus in Broughton recently and saw working-class young men and women obtaining level 4 and 5-equivalent degrees on the shop floor and coming out with no debt whatsoever. He also spoke about social housing, which was key for me. I had a secure tenancy growing up, even though I grew up in a council flat on a council estate in Manchester. How many young people nowadays get that?

What my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock) said about music resonated with me. She has one of the best choirs in Europe in her constituency. Music, arts and culture are a great way to raise aspiration. She is a fantastic representative of a coal-mining community, and she said that those communities need sustained and long-term investment. I thank the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott) for her ambassadorship for the Sutton Trust. She is right: we need more working-class kids going to Russell Group universities. I have some appalling statistics of free-school-meal kids who cannot really get into my fantastic local Russell Group university. The numbers are so few. We have to work harder.

The hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) clearly said that the education of women is key to raising social mobility. However, with austerity, the economics we have had and the lack of social justice, it is no wonder that it is stalling. It is worth noting that there was no explicit reference to social mobility in the Queen’s Speech. It has stagnated. That is not my view; that was the view of the Social Mobility Commission, which is part-sponsored by the Government. Members may recall that the board of the Commission resigned en masse in 2017 because it thought that the Government were not taking this seriously enough.

A 2017 Social Mobility Commission report stated:

“There is a fracture line running deep through our labour and housing markets and our education system.”

In other words: our society is divided and unequal. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston pointed out, the then social mobility commissioner stated that appointments to key commission roles were left vacant for years, and went on to say in an interview in The Sunday Times that the Government had shown

“indecision, dysfunctionality and a lack of leadership”.

It took more than six months for the Government to appoint a new commission, so there was no doubt at that point that the Government were not prioritising the issue. However, the new commission revealed that more than half a million more children were living in poverty than in 2012. Furthermore, levels of social mobility remained “virtually stagnant” since 2014—almost five wasted years.

I am extremely proud of my country, but the report by the United Nations special rapporteur that was published last year made me feel ashamed. The report described how our social safety net had been badly damaged by drastic cuts in Whitehall, how the glue that held British society was coming unstuck, deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh, uncaring ethos.

[Mr Peter Bone (in the Chair)]

Order. I am sorry to interrupt the shadow Minister, as this is an important debate, but we have limited time. He is over his five minutes.