This page contains an AI generated transcript of the welcome address delivered by Alun Francis, Chair of the Social Mobility Commission, at Manchester Hall on 15 September. You can also watch a recording of the speech, below.
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Thank you. I wasn’t meant to be introducing the session today. We had a Minister lined up to do that but there happened to be a reshuffle at just the wrong moment. But as the social mobility team knows, I always have a long speech ready just in case. So I’m afraid you’ve got me for the first 45 minutes. So first of all thank you very much all of you for coming. It’s a great privilege to welcome you to part two of our Social Mobility Symposium here in Manchester, which has been my adopted home for the last 35 years.
There is a joke, of course, about which city in the UK can most righteously claim the status of the second city. And we know that in Birmingham they think it’s Birmingham, and Leeds they think it’s Leeds, and in Edinburgh they think it’s Edinburgh, and Cardiff thinks it’s Cardiff. But in Manchester, we think it’s London.
So London is where part one of our symposium took place last week and one or two of you I think were there as well as here. And that’s fitting because London is where policy is made. It’s where lobbying takes place. It’s where most of the organizations who are interested in social mobility are based. And if you’ve read any of our State of the Nation reports in the last three years, reports which contain the empirical evidence on actual social mobility trends, you will know that conventional bottom to top long range upward mobility is much more likely to happen to someone growing up in one of the London boroughs than anywhere else in the UK. So London leads on so many indicators used to measure social mobility, school performance, university progression, elite employment, earnings, and so forth. And this is because of London’s dominant and leading role in our economy.
Now, it’s not unusual to have a lead city in any country. It’s not unusual for businesses to cluster together and for talent to gravitate towards opportunity and for them to reinforce each other in an ever more virtuous and affluent cycle. Economists call it an agglomeration and it’s fundamental to the dynamics of economic growth.
But in our country, the gap between London and everywhere else is disproportionately big. And it means that we have huge geographical disparities which underpin massive variations in opportunity and outcomes. And these disparities, their causes and effects explain a great deal about the current dilemmas which our country is facing. For the first time, it’s not clear that the younger generation are going to do better than their parents. There are too many people and places who are left behind, whichever word you would want to use to describe them. There is an increasing lack of public confidence in the ideas that hard work and talent will yield the benefits they should supposedly bring. And we don’t seem to have sufficient stability and consensus in the policy world to be sure about what needs to be done to remedy this, what works, or even what good might look like.
We shouldn’t be overly gloomy. There are some superb social mobility success stories and I can pick out a few. There’s been a big long-term shift in occupational structure which has generated so many more opportunities for professional employment and that’s a long-term trend. And if I was just to read out some of the rates of actual social mobility in the absolute sense, the number of people whose parents did one kind of occupation, but they’re doing a different kind of occupation. I think you’d be quite surprised. So 52% of people born into lower working-class backgrounds are in professional jobs. 61% from the upper working class. 67% of people born into higher professional families end up downwardly mobile. So in an absolute sense there’s quite a high degree of social mobility. And of course what we talk about most of the time in social mobility is relative. The comparisons between people from different backgrounds, what’s their relative chance of getting to a particular place? But if you look at the absolute trends that’s quite significant and that is because of the changes in occupational structure. Alongside that we’ve seen the mass expansion of higher education including a narrowing gap in terms of progression to university for people from different socio-economic backgrounds. We’ve seen the improved educational performance of many particularly in London. We’ve seen that some, including quite poor people from low socio-economic backgrounds, have spectacularly good educational outcomes. If I mention Chinese and Indian children as two examples, we’ve seen some long-term improvements in outcomes educationally and in employment for women. None of those areas are perfect. There’s always more that can be done, but they are better. So it’s important to remember the story is not a universally dismal one. But we do have some very real challenges and I’ve highlighted already what these are in macro terms. Our politicians don’t seem to have easy answers for those and we’ve also got to ask ourselves some really hard questions in terms of social mobility as to whether we have as well.
So when we think about social mobility, are we thinking about a concept which can really help us grapple with those challenges? Does the social mobility lens, the vantage point of social mobility, help illuminate those problems more clearly and help us find better solutions? We can’t take that as a given. Now, I’m sure most people in this room might think it’s a preposterous idea to question the usefulness of such an important concept, particularly when we’re in charge of the Social Mobility Commission. But there are many people who are social mobility skeptics. And in terms of the way the term is often used, I would count myself as one of them. In terms of the way social mobility entered the policy lexicon in this country and it is brilliantly described in a book by Jeff Payne, the new social mobility, how the politicians got it wrong, which came out in 2017. He’s a very well respected academic.
The term entered our policy lexicon very much on the basis of a false narrative of decline and on the basis of a very narrow use of the term. It was all about improving upward mobility from the bottom to the top without any recognition of the flaws and contradictions implied by this. By name of few, these are not all of them, just a few to illustrate the point. So in that model, we tend to want to find winners, but we don’t talk about the losers. John Goldthop who’s a very famous sociologist a pioneer of many of the important methodologies around social mobility measurement and probably one of the world authorities tells a story about being called into government around 2007/2008 to a round table discussion on social mobility and when he pointed out that you can’t have people going up without some people going down, nobody wanted to talk about it, that’s far too difficult, but the fact is you can’t if you’re going to improve the mobility of some it’s at somebody else’s expense and that is a part of the story that doesn’t get talked about much.
The second issue is so much depends on the accuracy of our definitions and the definitions are very good in terms of helping us with macro trends but they’re not always good when you translate them over into individual narratives. When you want to spot who you think should require help, who do you think are the ones that need the most interventions, that’s a much more complicated story. Which definitions do you use? Do you use occupational background at 14? Well, that’s the most reliable one. And yet, it’s full of flaws. Particularly if you consider what I just told you a few minutes ago. Most families are either on their way up or on their way down. And it’s a very moving picture. It’s a very fluid picture. And actually, that’s quite hard then to start to think, well, in terms of an individual, which indicators do you take to suggest actually they need more help than others? And how do you know they’re not going to make that trajectory anyway given what I’ve just described to you?
Third, we tend to focus very much on equalizing group outcomes. So the challenge becomes we’ve got people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, how do you equalize the outcomes for them? Sometimes though that can be quite misleading because you can end up not looking at the differences within groups. The example I would give to people to illustrate this point is that we spend a lot of time talking about how we help people who are academically able, from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, to progress through university and the education system into elite employment. But there’s been very little social mobility discussion about NEETs who at the other end of the spectrum at 16 to 24 are leaving school and they’re not in employment, education or training. And we’ve got over a million of them. It’s a really significant issue. And if we’re focused on “oh well what we need to do is equalize the outcomes between people from different socioeconomic backgrounds”, you can lose focus on actually that wider issue. And I would argue, and I would defend this view quite strongly, you lose focus on the people that need help the most because many of those people and they’re not a uniform group but many of those people are coming up with very low qualifications from school including extremely low literacy and numeracy and in an economy that’s driven by ideas that’s a terrible position to be in it’s really limiting to your opportunities.
That’s three that I’ve mentioned, the fourth, and this is an important one: we need to be really careful about not treating socioeconomic background as if it’s rigid and fixed. We had this discussion last week in London. Sir Trevor Phillips made it part of his introductory discussion when he pointed out that his father, Sir Trevor Phillips was the youngest of 10 children, and his father had finally got into a professional job at the age of 57. And as the youngest child of 10, he was very much almost that our definition is, what the occupation of your parents are at 14 determines your outcome. But you can get the same people in the same family who therefore fall into different groups, if you’re not very reflective about the fact that socioeconomic background is quite fluid, it’s not the same as other inequality or equality characteristics. And that needs to be thought about quite carefully. And that has very tangible outcomes if you’re trying to think about interventions because it’s very easy to focus on the wrong people.
The fifth point and one we’ve made plenty, but has to be made again and again, is when we look at occupations in particular it’s based on an occupational hierarchy. The way we think about occupations is that there is a national system for classifying occupations. So you get a clear lower working class, higher working class, intermediate lower professional, higher professional. That’s a five class model. There’s a seven class model which is more sophisticated. But actually, when you look at those closely, and I say this with heartfelt interest as somebody that runs a further education college in the north of England, many of the things we teach our students to do actually are classified as lower occupations, but actually we know they earn a lot of money. But the classic examples would be, well, who earns more, a plumber or a primary school teacher? Now there’s more complicated aspects to that problem but that hierarchy is quite important and it can also lead us to start to think that actually the only good social mobility outcome for somebody is to follow that professional pathway to elite occupations and actually that isn’t always the right solution for everybody and we might be just measuring the wrong thing. I would liken it to saying if we decided that every horse in the country had to be measured, their qualities as a horse had to be measured, on whether they were suitable to enter into the Grand National, and we said that was the only measure that you could have then what would happen to all the Shetland ponies and the cart horses and the horses that are designed to do other things. Only a certain number of horses are designed to run steeplechase races and most horses are not. So you can’t use that surely as the measure for success. But in our education system, we’d probably do have that single measure of success. And in social mobility, sometimes we reinforce that. So that occupational hierarchy is a real challenge.
And finally, too much of our social mobility discussion becomes very quickly about the equality of elites. It’s about equality within elite groups. And therefore, actually most people are not that interested because it’s not about them. Only a small number of people are interested in that kind of equal outcome and therefore if we’re not careful we can define our social mobility problem in a way that actually, for many people across the country, they just think it’s irrelevant.
Now, I’d illustrate this point by when I first started in this role as Deputy Chair and then Chair of the Social Mobility Commission. I noticed a huge difference in attitude towards social mobility and the Commission when I met people in London compared to elsewhere. So, employers in London are organized. They’re very interested in social mobility in that particular version of it. They’re very concerned about recruitment practices. They’re very concerned about where they find talent from. They are really seriously interested in it and they’re doing a lot of work on it. When I came out to talk to some of the regions, they just kind of said “well okay we’ll talk to you but it’s not that high on our agenda”. I had to explain to them “but I’m talking about a kind of slightly different way of thinking about it”, then the conversation would open up, because there are these real big disparities in terms of what kind of social mobility people see as being particularly important. And for many places outside London, they see that traditional model very much as saying, well, it’s all about talent leaving us and we want talent to stay. We want to think very differently about it. Now, I think that some of my skepticism about social mobility is based on the fact that I come from here, that I think about it in the way that many of those people do. There’s a healthy skepticism about it. So I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that I live and work in Manchester and have that kind of view. But I also think there’s a different view because I know quite a bit about this city’s history and because, not only do we still think London is the second city, I would say social mobility was actually invented here. So although I’d say that actually much of what we think of is a model of social mobility that works for London, I’m going to make the claim today that actually social mobility in Manchester, we have the claim that actually it started here.
I know if you read the literature, it will tell you that the first person to systematically use the term social mobility was a Russian sociologist called Pitirim Sorokin who wrote a landmark book on social mobility in 1927. And that the sociological literature that we now know in the UK started with a man called David Glass in the 1950s before the great names of social mobility studies, John Goldthorp, Anthony Heath, Blauen Duncan and a host of others began to build the literature which we now have today. And it is a very rich and complex literature. But the idea that your origin should not determine your destination was not invented by academics. It was an essential aspect of the birth of modern societies. In pre-industrial societies, what we now call social mobility was not possible. They were rigid and hierarchical. So much so that your family name frequently was the same as your occupation.
So I don’t know if there’s anybody in the room called Baker. Anybody called Fisher or Miller or Turner or Potter or Cooper? Notice nobody’s putting their hands up. There might be, but anybody called Smith comes from the term blacksmith. Anybody called Taylor and if you want local ones for Lancashire, anybody called Webster that was derived from the term for weaving and of course Weaver and of course a famous Lancastrian named Shuttleworth. These are all names that reflect pre-industrial times your family name and your occupation were absolutely tied together. Even the name Walker which apparently comes from a part of the process for making cloth involved people walking on the cloth. So people became known as Walker because of it. So if your starting point was humble in those days your family was tied to your occupation. It was passed on. There was not much in terms of social mobility and you had almost no chance if you were born into a humble family of, for example becoming an adviser to the King, that just wouldn’t happen. Which is the equivalent of a modern politician really. So the King would have a court and that court would be advisers but they would always come from either a church background or another aristocratic background and you wouldn’t really have that route through.
Now that system broke down through a series of economic and social changes which undermined the aristocratic system and made what Napoleon first called the career open to talents, a term we sometimes still hear, more possible and allowed individuals to acquire wealth status and political influence in ways that hadn’t previously been possible. And the apex of this process happened here in Manchester in the 1840s. So prior to that point, this city hadn’t even been a city. It was a marketplace and it started to expand from the 1750s and what was crucial to Manchester’s future was it had no landed gentry. So it’s outside of the old guild system. It was outside of aristocratic control. It had one of the few places where a market could grow and there was no regulation. There was nobody to stop it happening. And so as it grew so did the pressure on it to find forms of government and a voice in national politics. I am hugely truncating a very complicated story here, but it does make my point. And of course, it did so most effectively through something called the Anti-Corn Law League. And if you’ve heard of the Anti-Corn Law League, if you haven’t heard of it or you have heard of it, many of the members of the Anti-Corn Law League, first of all formed a political group in Manchester which fought for incorporation for the city to be made into a city. That was their first victory. And on the back of that victory, they then lobbied the government to change national economic policy to free trade. And why did they want that? Because cotton manufacturers and merchants wanted free trade as opposed to aristocrats that wanted protectionism on corn. Hence the Anti-Corn Law League. So by challenging the national government, they opened up the world to free trade. And therefore that was seen as the cotton interest, the cotton merchants and manufacturers influencing national policy for the first time over and above the influence that the aristocrats had had. So the aristocrats wanted protectionist policies on corn and therefore applied to other things, the cotton industry didn’t and Manchester won. Now the hero of this story has a statue down the road in St. Ann’s Square, his name is Richard Cobden. In my view, probably, there’s a toss up between one or two footballers possibly, but probably Manchester’s greatest figure in history, even if he also was an adopted Manunian.
Now, what this illustrates is a point that we have made recently in our paper on Innovation and Social Mobility. But social mobility shouldn’t just be seen as about equivalizing outcomes in an equality sense. It needs to be situated much more firmly in understanding the economic and social processes which drive our country. And in that paper we drew on some of the research that economists have done on innovation and how it works. And what they describe there is how in the economic process elites form but and in the process of doing that they disrupt the existing elites. In this instance, the cotton industry disrupted the aristocracy. But you can see other changes. You can see the changes around modern tech for example and how disruptive that is in terms of traditional elites. And what tends to happen is that once elites establish themselves, they then start to protect themselves. They will lobby. They will form relationships with government. They will want all kinds of practice that consolidate their position. The challenge though is to make sure the competition is open so that others can come in their turn and be disruptive and challenge. And that dynamic process is quite critical to both driving growth but also making sure constantly there’s that openness to talent. When those things close down, the obstacles to talent are in place you tend to find that those elites they tend to derive rents from their position rather than having an economy that brings benefits to everybody. Now what that means it’s very important in terms of policy to think actually if that sits at the center of economic growth you can see the inherent link between a dynamic economy and one which fosters social mobility and the key point being here being it’s not just about those elites it’s about what that brings in terms of wider economic and social benefits.
Now there’s a tradition in economics which talks about this people like Adam Smith, he talked about it famously, the economist Schumpeter, but if you also prefer a slightly different tradition, I would just remind you that Kanes was also a fan in his younger days of Richard Cobden. It brings a perspective on social mobility which we’ve lost and yet arguably it’s central to making social mobility more relevant. The most important way I think is how can social mobility address some of those regional differences that I’ve been talking about and we’ve talked about in our previous literature. If it’s not about economic opportunity, if it’s not about those things and those things are taken as a given, then we just accept the shape of the economy that we’ve got. And that means for large parts of the country, opportunity is fairly limited. So it’s only when we start to get into the economics as well as the social processes that we start to think how can we unpick some of those disparities on a regional and geographical basis.
It’s also important to the current question about well what are we going to do to maintain this notion that each generation should be wealthier than their parents, and that is a significant challenge not just in our country but in others at the moment. That sense that you can’t see that progress and when you hear stories about young people for example who have followed the social mobility pathway, they’ve done well at school they’ve left the area they came from they ended up in London they’ve got a professional job and they can’t afford a house. The model is starting to be under real strain. And you can see that has real terrible impacts on families. So no house means they don’t form families, we know they are forming families later, that means grandparents don’t have grandchildren, there are all sorts of implications that follow from these things if the system does not work well.
There is a whole range of other things also about how much talent is being wasted across the country because of where people were brought up and born. I don’t think I need to tell you that here in Manchester, you can see that, but my college is in Blackpool. But you can go to the North East, you can go to Yorkshire, you can go to the Midlands, you can see all of these patterns where you think the economy just is not vibrant enough to create that wider range of opportunities that we want to see. And it is also important that we find some ways of making this work well so that people start to believe that talent, hard work, the rules of the game really, actually are worth bothering with. And there is an increasing sense that actually some people are starting to feel that they are not.
But we need to reward those who acquire new skills, encourage them to have new skills, encourage them to be innovative, encourage them to think about where they can make their contribution, and the key to this is that we must have a high literacy, a high numeracy learning society with life long skills. But that critically needs to include everybody, and as I mentioned earlier the significant proportion of people in this country who are not part of that process and we are not very good at helping them develop their skills in the way that I have just described.
So I wont labour the point, I hope that I am persuading you to agree with me that this is the more promising theory of social mobility, than the one which has tended to dominate policy but we have to think about the integration of education and social processes with those wider economic changes or we won’t improve social mobility for everybody. We will improve it for some but not for others.
I also think this is an approach which is really pertinent to the challenges that we generally face today, and that is especially true if we can find a policy mechanism for delivering it. And at the Social Mobility Commission we think we can. And that is through place based approaches. So we need a theory of social mobility which recognises that it must be grounded in economic growth, or it becomes a zero sum game which can’t include everybody.
In our country that means recognising the unevenness between London and elsewhere. It means we need to do more to understand the disparities that we have talked about, what has caused them and how difficult it might be to turn those around. And we have to learn from places where that has happened. And of course Manchester is the one that has done most in that respect. Manchester has changed dramatically. If you look at our indicators in all of our State of the Nation reports you can see that Manchester is doing best outside of London in terms of the number of professional occupations, the range of opportunities that it can provide in that respect. It is still doing quite badly on some other indicators, particularly outcomes for children, particularly school performance in some areas and so forth. But bare in mind Manchester has taken 35 years or more to get to the point where it is now. And it has been a herculean effort here. And if you look across the country you can see other places starting on that journey. Some of them are quite a way down that journey. Other places are further back.
We did a podcast a couple of weeks ago with Steve Rotheram the Mayor of Liverpool and again you can see massive changes in Liverpool. But one of the things that we discussed in that podcast was, yes but it takes so long. It just takes so long. You know 35 years, that is two generations of children growing up in Manchester that haven’t seen the benefits of all of that, so you think that that pace of change is very very slow, in terms of how you get the benefits extending across whole communities.
And if we want to have place based strategies that will start to get underneath these problems then I think we have got to be much much more challenging in many respects. I will mention a few. So innovation, enterprise, investment, they are not just about glamorous trophy projects, it’s about re-shifting a whole culture. And I know that we are going to talk about that later on today in some work that we have got coming out. I think that there are some really interesting challenges in there about what kind of education system we have. The foundation of our education system must be knowledge. It must be really important that people acquire knowledge and skills from education. But it is also about saying that we need a variety of people knowing different things, rather than that kind of Grand National approach that I described earlier. As you can imagine as somebody that works in an FE college I am a big supporter of technical skills and applied learning. These are things which have been overlooked in our country because it has tended to be a one size fits all model. And it is creativity that is required for innovation that comes from that mixture of really well grounded knowledge and skills and the application of them. Some innovations are not complicated, they are really simple things that people just do because they know their work process well, and they make small adjustments that make massive changes. Others are much more complicated like some of the tech things that we see.
That means we can’t have that one size fits all University model. We have to have degrees but we also have to have apprenticeships with strong foundations in the reality of work. And we have to be flexible at how we deliver them. There’s all kinds of issues about how we get to do that because if you look at the spread of apprenticeships, particularly higher level apprenticeships and degrees, they tend to happen in the areas where the economy is strongest. That’s a real challenge when you’re looking at areas outside of those growth sectors. And when you read in the paper articles that say why are people doing all these degrees, they’re not getting the returns on those degrees. No, they’re not sometimes because it depends which area of the country you’re in. And in some areas of the country, you can look for a very long time to find an apprenticeship. And if I was young, I’d probably choose the degree rather than not do anything at all. Even though I might prefer the apprenticeship if it was available. It’s very difficult to travel for apprenticeships. We don’t build halls of residence for apprentices. We don’t say it’s easy for you to go to London and get an apprenticeship and come back. It’s much more easy to do that through the university system. So there’s a whole lot of interesting questions I think attached to these grand statements. And it’s absolutely about recognizing the wider range of talents that we need in a modern economy and not having that one-size-fits-all approach. And it has to be about what we need to do to bring prosperity and a better life to those who are at the bottom because it’s evident from our data that some people do get stuck.
We have in social mobility terms often some of the economists and sociologists refer to it as a sticky top and a sticky bottom. There’s a lot of mobility in the middle. There is quite a lot. But there are people who are very, very privileged and there are people who are very, very much stuck. And we sometimes lose that perspective. We tend to kind of think in very simple terms about have and have not. And it’s just not that simple. There’s a spectrum at the bottom of which there’s some real lack of opportunity and at the top some real privilege. But in the middle it is quite a different story. And those people at the bottom, as I’ve said, are the most neglected. They’re the most at sea in terms of a life which progresses. And the answers that we’ve given always tend to be one form of welfare or another. I’m not against all of that. But I do think when I look at how far the welfare system integrates with helping people develop their skills and realize their potential, the two don’t always sit together very well.
So we use this term in education called self-efficacy. So we used it to talk about the belief that you can achieve. It’s a sense of being in control and self-efficacy is very important to students who do well because they believe that if they work hard that they will do well. And it’s really interesting when you read about the research into why Chinese and Indian students do so well. The work on Chinese families talks about their very, very high aspirations. But here’s a really interesting thing. They don’t believe it’s all about innate ability. It’s about you just work hard and you get to the best level that you can. It’s not that they believe that they’ve got any special talents. It’s absolutely just about hard work. And I think that’s a really important point. The belief that if you put the effort in, the return will come. And that isn’t necessarily there for everybody and there are lots of obstacles in our welfare system. It’s very difficult to integrate going back to improve your skills particularly for groups in the particularly deprived areas and of course that means that we don’t focus on helping individuals fulfil their potential and therefore make their wider contribution. We sometimes lose that focus and I think it’s an important point.
Now our belief is actually unlocking these complex problems can only really be done at a place-based level. They’re too complicated to do at Westminster, which is why policy often fails. We talked about some of this in the podcast I’ve mentioned with Steve Rotherham, but we’ve also been doing some work that Ryan and other social mobility commissioners in the room have been doing over recent months, which we call regional insights. We’ve been going across the country talking to people about what the issues are that are holding your area back and what else could be done. And we’re going to be publishing that soon. We are going to be working on a place-based toolkit around what a place-based approach can bring in terms of social mobility and why that is the best kind of way of getting into this problem. And in that though, we are going to have to talk about being sharper on some of the challenges it brings. It’s not just about reinforcing the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist in this country is all about devolution at the moment. That’s really something that I think there’s an emerging political consensus about. We’re going to argue that we need some sharper questions. Again, I’m going to say that Manchester started something that the rest of the country should follow.
When the first devolution deal was done in 2014, it was called Devo Manc. It was a deal that was unique to Manchester and it was a deal brokered by Howard Bernstein, Sir Howard Bernstein, who died last year, working directly with George Osborne when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. And the deal was this. We want the resources to take control of dealing with our local problems, but in return, we’re going to help grow the economy. And what we’re going to do is, by solving those local problems, we’re going to create more opportunity and we will increasingly take less tax from the central government, because we’re going to be paying more for ourselves. We want to stand on our own two feet. That view of devolution has been lost. And yet it’s a really good sharp focus, because it focuses on purpose. It says the purpose has to be whatever it takes to start to reverse this sense that London has done well and the other parts of the country haven’t kept up, and in fact everywhere outside of London in this country takes more in tax from central government than it pays back. And that’s the extent to which our economy has become very lopsided.
I think that that starting point also means that we have to get into some really hard questions which I don’t think politicians want to get involved in, but I think we need to, which is there’s a kind of sense and you can see this in the way leveling up funding was doled out. So leveling up funding was we’re going to have small pots of money you’ll bid for them and we’re just going to pepper pot it all over the country. And of course what that does is mean everything’s mediocre and that’s been the big criticism about leveling up. It just didn’t deliver because it spread the jam too thinly. Nobody really got the benefit. We have got to start to have a conversation as to whether every place and every town in every place is recoverable to the level they were in their pomp and their heyday, because they’re not.
And what happens is if we don’t ask that question, you end up with places that become traps for poverty and opportunity because it’s never going to significantly change. You’re going to have to leave if you’re young. Now, that doesn’t mean that’s the same for everybody, but it does mean you can’t just try and do the same for everywhere because it just isn’t going to work. So, for Manchester, for example, the view from all of the people who know a lot about this, who look at cities and growth, would say for all the work done in Manchester, for it to lift the surrounding area, it needs to be three times bigger than it is currently. But that is the best future for the surrounding towns is for Manchester to grow and the spillovers to happen. But we need to think that through more carefully across the country rather than giving the sense that everywhere can improve, everywhere can change and not really looking at what that practically implies.
Now, it also means giving more control to those local areas within a much more managed framework, and it means taking on some things that currently are obstacles in terms of that devolution place-based approach. We know that some things in that process have worked well, but others have worked less well. But we can also see some real inflexibilities. Education is one of them. If we talk to the mayors, they all say the DOE is the most inflexible, the least understanding of those place-based differences. We’ve got a session later on the theme of why some places in this country persistently, I don’t mean for five years or 10 I mean for 30 years, come bottom in terms of educational outcomes. And we’ve had a host of things to try and improve those outcomes and they’re still bottom. Why do we not understand that? Why do we not have better strategies for that? Why do we keep changing our policies all the time? But there is something there that’s really important and it affects whole communities and places which we need to understand. And education is central to that.
Apprenticeships is another example. I’ve mentioned some of the things about the geography of apprenticeships, but that is an area where actually arguably greater control at a local level might produce some much better outcomes. And I think building this whole notion of innovation, the role of our universities being restored to their original function. Most of our universities started off because they had a direct relationship to the businesses and the economics of their area. I think that needs restoring, but they also need to be much more helpful in terms of how we solve some of our social, educational and cultural issues as well. Far too often I go and look at the educational output of university departments and they find they write complicated things about regimes of accumulation and educational outcomes. I don’t really understand what they’re talking about. How do we get poor kids to do better? That’s our biggest question. What do we do to make that happen? And actually those are our real challenges as are the challenges of innovation in social care, innovation in health care, innovation in the private economy. And those are things that universities as places of knowledge and learning can really help us unpick and unpack.
It means also focusing on new ways of how to make better lives for the most disadvantaged. I mentioned the issue about welfare. Welfare does need reforming. We’ve got too many examples. I’ve got some of my colleagues here from Blackpool. We are working very hard on what we do to create some pathways for needs and it’s complicated but it’s too easy to get left out of the system where nobody talks to you and if you don’t have a supportive family or you don’t know people that can help you. You’re literally just left to your own devices and that means a very small network of people, no educational outcomes, probably spending a lot of time on your own. There’s a report this morning about new research on what young people do. And that report says that some young people spend more time gaming than they do in school. That’s what people do when they’re left to their own devices in modern society. And actually, if you want to know why there’s such a mental health crisis, some of these things are part of that. I’m not saying they’re the sole reason, but they are definitely part of it. And therefore, cracking that open so we start to create some better pathways back to support people to have a better life. And the purpose of welfare surely should be to do that. And too often it just seems to lose its focus.
The same applies to support for families. The same applies to making the route to skills for everybody, no matter what their age or stage. The fact that you can improve your skills and therefore earn more money, but also feel more proud of what you’ve learned. That surely has to be central to our thinking. And that doesn’t just mean traditional apprenticeships in university. Our adult skills provision has been neglected. We’ve had no significant review of adult skills in the last 15 or 20 years. We get some changes to the rules, but not about the purpose and about the volume of funding. We get a bit of qualification reform and so on, but you know, there’s a whole host of things that could be done with that adult funding and interestingly with the levy reform as well, but adult skills has got to be central to this if we want to help the most disadvantaged. It can’t all be about early years and schools. It’s got to be about parents because parents are looking after those children and actually sometimes have got such low qualifications themselves. It must be really difficult. We’re asking them to read with their children and many of them just don’t like reading and aren’t very good at it, don’t enjoy it. There’s a long way to go in terms of helping unpick some of those problems.
But it’s really also important that people who are disadvantaged are in a society where wealth is increasing and there are opportunities for them to get into well-paid employment. So creating the pathways is part of it, but lifting the overall economy is absolutely critical. One of the findings that’s interesting in the research on innovation is that highly skilled people tend to do well whether they’re in an innovative place or not because their skills are in short supply. But some of the people who do benefit the most are those with lower level skills because they’re working for companies and they have what economists call tacit knowledge. They’re the people that might know a lot about how a business operates and as the business improves and grows, the company will keep them because they just know they know everybody in the business. They might not have a highly skilled job, but they’re invaluable to that business. And therefore, the benefits that they get tend to be disproportionate. And that lifting people’s outcomes is really important.
And it means reconstructing the kind of opportunity game of snakes and ladders, so that people start to have some real confidence that hard work, effort give them rewards. And that is something that appears to be lost not just for the most disadvantaged but across the board. Now, that all sounds very complex. And it is. Let’s not make any mistakes. There are no easy answers to any of these issues. However, it’s not quite so out of reach as it seems. So, I’m going to give you one example. We’ve got a piece of work that my deputy Rob Wilson has been chairing and again is going to be talked about today around what can be done across the country around economic growth and innovation. But in advance of us publishing that, which is going to come out hopefully this autumn, I’m going to pick one example of housing. And I’m just going to give you a little indication of if we could get this one thing right, what would it do to help the problems I’ve been talking about.
So it’s a great example because as a US economist called Brian Kaplan has recently argued it’s a panacea solution and we don’t have many of those. A Panacea solution is when you solve one problem and help with others at the same time. We don’t have many things that do that. But let’s just go through the issue about housing. We know we’ve got a problem with overregulation that is now accepted across all parties and economists of different political persuasions. It’s around housing, land use, and the green belt. We know there was recently a discussion about building a better train line between Liverpool and Manchester. And somebody pointed out, yes, but the paperwork that would take to get that through court and through planning would be longer than the train line. And this is why in our country we fail on so many big projects. Um, recently I remember the two actors that have taken over Rexom Football Club, you know, in North Wales. I can’t remember the name of the actors, I haven’t watched their films, but they are very well known Hollywood superstars. And they said they cannot believe the amount of regulation in this country. They just want to build an extension to the football ground. They said the amount of people they have to meet and go through to just build one building is like nothing they’ve seen before in any of the other projects that they’ve done. And we know that this regulation has really undermined the supply of new homes and that combined there are other factors, but that fundamentally is one of the reasons why house values are so high and this has reached a point where social mobility dreams of so many are being frustrated. As I pointed out earlier, young people can’t afford to buy houses. The multiples of income they’ve got to get to be able to buy them is ridiculous. Even for those who are doing quite well in income and occupational terms, it’s affecting family formation. It’s affecting the age at which people have children. It’s restricting opportunity to only those who can inherit or can borrow from the bank of mum and dad. It’s regionally very unequal. So that one problem has so many offshoots. So unblocking this problem will immediately drive growth. It will provide opportunities for employment across a wide range of occupations including graduate and non-graduate roles.
Both young people and adults can be upskilled relatively quickly to participate. If you want to know how, we have a brilliant project at Blackpool and the Fylde College called Buildup. We train adults very quickly to get ready to get their CS card which gets them into work. And if you want to know about it, Jane Dunston who sat there will be able to tell you. It’s not impossible to train people quickly to get ready for those occupations. It does require certain circumstances to come together. But these are both graduate and non-graduate occupations. It is possible to do that. And that means you’re starting to provide opportunities for people who have got a wide range of educational achievement. Construction requires people that have got very high levels of educational achievement, but actually you can get into level two jobs in brick work without a great deal and they’re really well-paid jobs. So, it will also solve our housing crisis, bringing down prices, reducing rents in the private sector, and allowing us to reduce transients, which in some areas is a massive problem. Particularly some of our seaside towns, and homelessness which is a problem all over.
So unblocking the supply of housing may start with policies at a national level but coordinating the delivery on the ground is surely best done locally, where planning the pipeline of projects, the demand and supply of skills and the integration with transport public services and so forth can all be brought together. It’s just one example of an area of policy which is overregulated and if we could unpick that it would unlock a lot of other things. There’s a whole literature on this. Digital markets, professional and occupational regulation, barriers to entry, finance, intellectual property rights. There’s a whole list of other areas which policy makers might want to look at to create an economy that moves faster and quicker. I give these examples of why it’s worth taking a different view on social mobility in the way that we’ve described because it’s only if you start to take that macro view that you start to underpin some of those things that need to be done to bring that opportunity to everybody.
It also explains why we’ve invited some of the speakers who are going to be leading some of the events at this symposium. And I hope you will agree that when I say that we have some excellent themes and some brilliant contributors. So shortly this morning we’ve got a panel on innovation social mobility which is chaired by Rob Wilson who is Deputy Chair of the Social Mobility Commission and has been leading our work in this area. We also have after that a short break for lunch, and then this afternoon a series of events particularly focused on issues of special interest to those of us up North. So, we’ve got some local perspectives on social mobility chaired by Meg Price from Public First who oversaw some place-based research which we commissioned earlier this year and I think there’s some really interesting themes in there. We’ve got a session on green skills chaired by Julie McLaren talking about how that can link up with wider economic growth and opportunity. We’ve got a session chaired by Dr. Ryan Swift on young people in the north. We’ve got another session on tackling long-term disadvantages in the north chaired by Emma Porter and a final panel which I’m looking forward to chairing this afternoon on ‘Why are educational outcomes so persistently low in certain areas?’. A huge thank you to all of our partner organisations who are hosting and have organised these events and to our panelists who I am sure will help us debate those issues in an informed and open way. I hope you enjoy the day, but more importantly, I hope you leave here with some new challenges to think about. Is social mobility a useful concept for dealing with the current problems we’ve got? And if it’s a concept that applies to helping everybody, what is it that we need to do, to change the way we think about it so that it addresses those problems that we’ve described, which are pressing and real and not just about the lucky few.
Thank you very much.