Foreworld
This is our first annual report since the 2015 UK General Election. On the morning after the
election the Prime Minister set a One Nation agenda for this Parliament. Britain, he said,
should be “a place where a good life is in reach for everyone who is willing to work and do the
right thing”. His would be a government for working people – it would ensure that those who
made an effort were fairly rewarded. It would be a government that offered opportunity to all –
no matter where they came from.
The Commission warmly welcomes this One Nation commitment and the Prime Minister’s
recognition that lower poverty and higher mobility are essential if Britain is to fulfil its potential,
be at ease with itself and be confident about the future. In this report we take the Prime
Minister’s aspiration as our benchmark. A One Nation society is one where opportunities
are shared equally and are not dependent on the family you were born into, the place where
you live or the school you attend. It is a society where being born poor does not condemn
someone to a lifetime of poverty. Instead it is a society where your progress in life – the job
you do, the income you earn, the lifestyle you enjoy – depends on your aptitude and ability,
not your background or your birth.
These are the hallmarks of a truly open, fair and meritocratic society. They are a long way
from the Britain in which we live. In this report we explore in detail the gulf between where
Britain is today and where the Prime Minister would like it to be. We do so not as a counsel of
despair, but in order to set out the scale of the One Nation challenge facing the country and
to provide the yardstick against which future progress can be judged.
Over many decades, successive governments have sought to boost social mobility and
reduce child poverty. Contrary to today’s prevailing climate of cynicism about politics, those
efforts have produced real results. Child poverty has fallen by a third since 1997.
There are fewer children in workless households than at any time in two decades. Employment is at record levels and educational inequalities, though wide, have slowly narrowed. More working class youngsters are benefiting from higher education than at any point in history.
Britain today has the fastest growing economy in the G7. It is also welcome that social mobility has become a new holy grail of public policy. It is a priority for government and in turn it has become a priority for many schools, colleges, universities and employers. Increasingly, many early years services, local authorities and voluntary organisations have also stepped up to the plate and made the social mobility agenda their own. These are solid foundations on which a One Nation agenda can be built.
There are many reasons to be optimistic about the future. Nonetheless, it is obvious that
the progress to date has been too limited and too slow. In our report last year we warned
that without a dramatic change in approach to how governments, employers and educators
tackled child poverty and social mobility, Britain would become a permanently divided nation.
Nothing we have seen in the last 12 months has made us change our view. In this year’s
report we expose some of the deep divides that characterise modern Britain.
There is a growing social divide by income and by class. Looking at earnings, the income
share of the top 10 per cent has increased from 28 per cent to 39 per cent since 1979 and
the income share of the top 1 per cent has more than doubled from 6 per cent to 13 per cent
over the same time period. Looking at wealth, the wealth share of the top 10 per cent has
increased from 59 per cent to 66 per cent since 1991 and the wealth share of the top 1 per
cent has increased from 19 per cent to 23 per cent over the same time period.
At the very bottom of society there are more than one million children living a life of persistent poverty.
They are excluded from sharing in the many opportunities that life in modern Britain affords.
This form of social exclusion at the very bottom of British society finds an echo in the
exclusive social make-up of those at the very top. Those who rise to the top in Britain today
look remarkably similar to those who rose to the top half a century ago. In the professions,
71 per cent of senior judges, 62 per cent of senior armed forces and 55 per cent of Civil
Service departmental heads attended independent schools – compared to just 7 per cent of
the population who had a private education.
Of course, the best people need to be in the top jobs – and there are many good people who come from private schools and who go to top universities. But there can be few people who believe that the sum total of talent resides in just 7 per cent of pupils in the country’s schools. The warning from the former Conservative Prime Minister Sir John Major applies to all parts of these islands – in every single sphere of British influence the upper echelons of power are held overwhelmingly by a small elite. But, as we document in this report, social differences do not always follow common
assumptions. Scotland, for example, has the smallest number of children living in poverty
among the constituent nations of the UK, the lowest prevalence of low pay and far more young people from deprived areas going on to higher education. Wales has relatively high
poverty rates and few poorer children leaving school with good qualifications, despite having
more mothers with dependent children in work than most other parts of the UK. England
has a higher proportion of poorer children leaving school with good qualifications than the
other nations of the UK.
These national differences are amplified at a more local level. A North:South divide has long
been recognised. But that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the fissures that
have opened up in our country. It is only 100 miles from Norwich to St Albans, but they
are like two different countries. On average, men live three years longer in St Albans than
in Norwich, while women live nearly two years longer. The average salary in St Albans is
£32,595 compared to £19,382 in Norwich. There are nearly twice as many professional jobs
in the former compared to the latter. Unemployment in Norwich is almost double that of St
Albans. While 75.9 per cent of children leave school with five A–C grade GCSEs in St Albans,
only 43.8 per cent do so in Norwich. Not surprisingly, children in Norwich are over three times
as likely to be in low-income families as children in St Albans.
There are also big divides by gender and ethnicity. At school boys perform significantly worse
than girls. In 2014, boys’ GCSE results were 10 percentage points worse than girls’ with 52
per cent of boys achieving five good GCSEs compared with 62 per cent of girls. The best
results were achieved by Chinese girls (79 per cent) and the worst by black Caribbean boys
(39 per cent). In the world of work, the educational attainment gap between boys and girls is
reversed, with men getting paid more than women, especially after the age of 30.
So, social mobility is not just an issue about those at the very bottom of society or those at
the very top. It affects the whole of our society and every part of our country. Middle England
as much as Wales or Scotland. Rural communities as well as urban ones. At every level
ours is a small country characterised by a large divide. We are a long way from being a One
Nation Britain.
That is not to say that social mobility never happens. It does. There are countless stories of
people succeeding against the odds. But that is the point – they have to swim against the
tide in order to get on. Today’s Britain does not provide a level playing field on which people
can aspire to succeed. While educational attainment by children from disadvantaged families
has improved over the last two decades, the gap between them and their more fortunate
peers has improved only marginally. The number of disadvantaged children going to university has increased but they have much less chance of going to the most sought-after
universities than their privately educated peers. Employment has grown considerably
since 2010, yet despite recent improvements in real earnings, the number of workers who
are low paid has also increased. In recent times, more people are once again getting on to
the housing ladder but home ownership rates among the under-25s have halved in just 20 years.
The divisions in our nation run deep and, arguably, they are deepening. Unsurprisingly, the
proportion of people believing that poverty and inequality are one of the most important issues facing the UK has increased threefold since 2007. Those public concerns find
echoes across the political spectrum. It is welcome that all the main political parties now
advocate a Britain that is less elitist and more equal.
It seems that Britain may have reached an inflection point. If the trends of recent decades
continue we will become a society that is ever more divided. If, on the other hand, the One
Nation aspiration can be translated into real action, Britain could become the most open, fair
and mobile society in the modern world. In this report we assess whether the desire for a
different sort of society is being matched by policies capable of delivering it. Our conclusion
is that, despite many welcome initiatives, the current policy response – by educators and
employers as much as governments – falls well short of the political ambition. The gap
between rhetoric and reality has to be closed if the Prime Minister’s One Nation objective is to
be realised.
In the chapters that follow we examine how, across the lifecycle of individuals, the policy and
practice of governments, educators and employers has to move up a gear if we are to make progress towards Britain becoming a One Nation society.