This page contains an AI generated transcript of the keynote speech delivered by Sir Trevor Phillips and the welcome address delivered by Alun Francis, Chair of the Social Mobility Commission, at the Royal Society of Arts on 9 September. You can also watch a recording of the speech, including the post-speech Q&A, below.
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Welcoming address from Alun Francis:
Thank you very much. It’s a great privilege to welcome you all on a day when we gather to discuss social mobility, despite the obstacles presented by the limited physical mobility of the Tube. Apologies for the late start. Some of us coming from the North, I thought today was the day I was going to be the first here because I’d arrive in Euston, and just cab straight in. You’d all be struggling with the local transport and for once the northerners would come first. Sadly the northerners came last. So unfortunately we have a slightly late start. But we do have some very real social mobility challenges in this country. We all probably agree about that. I think everybody in the room would agree about that. But whether we agree about what they are and what the best solutions are is another question. And I would like to acknowledge that this symposium is to commemorate the anniversary of the founding legislation of the Social Mobility Commission which is the Child Poverty Act of 2010. And in many respects we would argue that that framework or the focus of that Act which is focusing on the most disadvantaged is the framework that we still use in the Social Mobility Commission.
But we would also argue that the concept of social mobility is a better way of trying to understand people’s opportunities than poverty alone. And I would say that I think we would say that for a number of reasons, but mainly because the concept of social mobility has within it a wider set of questions about what it is that makes human beings flourish. And in that respect, it allows us to break away from some of the very narrow views of social mobility and think more broadly about some of the problems and challenges that we’ve got. In particular, it allows us to think about things like inequality in a slightly more open way. Inequalities are not always bad things, but they are meant to be drivers of change. They’re meant to help us progress, but too often they don’t. Too often we get stuck with inequalities where some people appear to be entrenched, some places appear to be entrenched, and we don’t understand always why that is the case. And social mobility is also a concept that allows us to think more broadly and not just about inequalities but about the economic and social and cultural aspects of human flourishing, wealth creation as well as wealth distribution.
So it allows us to ask really big questions like are we making progress from one generation to another? Who is participating and how? Is there anybody left behind? What’s holding them back? Do our interventions work? And what’s the optimal level of social mobility – the point at which wealth creation and a good society balance out? We know that we’re struggling to answer these questions optimistically. In one sense, much of our social mobility story in this country is better than we think. And we’ve captured that in our state of the nation reports over the last three years. We can see lots of progress, progression into higher education, for example. We can see progress around race and ethnicity. We could see progress around race and gender. It’s not to say there isn’t more progress that can be made, but we can see some good stories. But we also know that there’s a model of social mobility that works so much better in London than it does elsewhere. If you are going to grow up poor and disadvantaged, London is a place that you’re much more likely to progress in than anywhere else in the country. And one of the things that we’ve pointed to in our reports is the real importance of geographical disparities and differences. And that’s why this symposium is one of two happening in the next week because we’ve got a second in Manchester next Monday.
So we’ve managed to hopefully capture the two aspects of social mobility and those geographical differences there. Now our aim in both of those symposiums, or symposia, sorry didn’t do Latin at school, not my school, but is there such a thing as symposia? Those two events serve to give a platform to the multiplicity of voices around social mobility, but also to provoke debate to challenge conventional thinking and encourage people to be brave and bold. And particularly today the focus is on disadvantaged families and communities and we’d like to encourage people to really think about that in the broadest possible way. And to help us start off on the right footing it’s my enormous pleasure to welcome our special guest. A distinguished broadcaster, writer, former Labour politician, recognized for his influential work in equality and diversity policy across the UK. He served as Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission from 2006 to 2012. He previously chaired the Commission for Racial Equality. He’s the co-founder of Weber Phillips which provides businesses with specialist data based insights and the Chair of Green Park who specialise in executive recruitment. Some of you will still be reading his regular column in the Times which is always interesting and you’ll hear him sometimes give his reflections on Times Radio to equal effect. It’s my enormous pleasure to welcome Sir Trevor Phillips OBE. Thank you.
Keynote from Trevor Phillips:
Well, good morning everybody and thank you for that very kind introduction, Alan. It’s always worthwhile so that everybody knows, as has been a mistake for my entire career, that, though I am that Trevor from the telly, I’m not the one that does the news at 10, which people still say to this day. I’ve been making that joke for years and it’s still true, It’s still true. I first of all want to say thank you for the privilege of speaking here. It’s mildly intimidating perhaps not for the reasons that you think.
The worst thing to be asked to do as a public figure is to think in public. Not many of us can do that and even worse to be asked to do it in front of your friends and I’m delighted that I’m here with Parminder and Tina who are old friends and I don’t think Raghib is here but I’m sure he’s going to hear what I have to say, and will no doubt send me one of a sort of Raghib Ali email explaining why I’m wrong about stuff.
Secondly, I think Alan’s very kind to point out that I spent some time as Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and one of the rules that I imposed on myself, I think it’s good manners, which is not to second guess your successors. I think one of the worst features of public life is people who used to do a job popping up on television programs, including ones like the one that I occasionally host, telling everybody that if only they were still in charge, everything would be much better and that they know exactly what to do. That is very rarely true. It is certainly not true in my case, but I do want to say a word about the Social Mobility Commission which had, I suppose what you might call modest beginnings. And when I was at the EHRC I suspect that most people would have thought about it as a sort of shadow, a slightly smaller brother or sister to the EHRC. But under the current leadership, I think it’s acquired a higher profile. It has set out a more thoughtful approach to definitions of social mobility. It has widened and sharpened, which is an unusual set of two things to do at the same time, the factors that drive and motivate social mobility. And I was particularly pleased to read in your recent report that geography is now part of your thinking. Now I want to come back to that point a little later. In fact, we thought at one point at the EHRC I can talk about publicly at one point that the SMC could be part of the EHRC and that would make sense. We’d all wrap everything into one neat package.
Actually, as I want to argue this morning, a more expansive definition of social mobility might actually lead you to the conclusion that it should be the other way around. That the Social Mobility Commission should lead on many of the big issues of social social justice and indeed personal satisfaction. I want to start just by saying very briefly that we tend to talk about social mobility as an issue of personal advancement to some extent of social justice, but rather narrowly. I would just like to put in the background of your conversation today my belief that there is a context here which is much, much larger than the context that we’ve always been thinking about when we use the term social mobility. If we look at the rest of the world, and in particular I want to mention India, social mobility is on steroids elsewhere. In India there have been 250 million people lifted out of poverty in the past three decades. More importantly, by 2031, the Indians reckon that 41% of their population will be in what they call the neo-middle class. There are all sorts of peculiar definitions about that, but let’s summarize it this way. These will be people with stable jobs, secure incomes, decent homes, and better education. Many of them will be people doing things, earning, managing their family life in a way that would have been unimaginable to their grandparents and possibly their parents.
So when we think about social mobility, I want to urge you not just to think about it as a sort of slightly degraded understanding of what we would in this country talk about as class mobility. But think about it as the extraordinary changes that are taking place across the globe. Some driven by technology, much driven by lifting whole populations out of poverty. And the reason I want to be part of the background is that the reason that social mobility is important to us in this country is not just about justice, though it is about that too, but it is also about competitiveness. It is not just that we would like people to feel better, but that if we are to prosper as a nation in the next century, we need to deploy every ounce of talent and capability that is available to us in this country. And we are in competition. Let’s be clear about that. We are in competition for success in some of the industries of the future. Let me walk back a little bit and ask a question of myself really, because when I sat down to think about what I’d say this morning because I’m quite simplistic. I started life as a chemist and an engineer and most chemists and engineers are untroubled by complexity in thinking. We start with, what are we trying to do here? And the question I ask myself is what is it that we really want to achieve?
I remember quite early on when I was at the Commission for Racial Equality and then subsequently EHRC, I thought I’d distilled it pretty cleverly with a simple statement. What’s our business? Our business is to ensure that as far as possible, your origins should not determine your destiny. Now, it’s okay. It’s quite neat. It’s not the whole story, but it’s quite neat. It’s part of the reason that when we thought about social mobility, we related it to equality as per the 2010 Equality Act. The task there was to ensure that your membership of a group with protected characteristics, race, sex, disability, and so on, should not be barriers to your choices in life. The indication of the notorious social mobility clause in the 2010 Act which, okay I’m guilty of, was an attempted recognition of the relationship between protected characteristics and what we used to call class, and we set out to codify the idea that over a generation a person might be able to access better education find wider occupational opportunities and achieve higher status in various ways than their parents and that frame the indicators that we use and to some extent that the SMC still use. And of course it’s a potent set of questions much talked about, even this morning I’m hearing that there’s some sort of trouble in the Labour party, and when is that never the case, but there’s going to be another contest, and it’s become clear just from the language.
You can’t expect to run for high office these days without declaring how far you’ve come from your parents’ backgrounds. Everybody now is an example of social mobility to some extent but delivered in their story by their own efforts, but to some extent perhaps delivered by policies that they champion. It’s all about narrative. But the point is that I think when we started to think about social mobility in the first part of this century, we thought about it as in some senses related to forms of discrimination, and that we should try to find understand whether there are institutional or cultural barriers to overcome and that’s why we sought aggregate data because that’s generally speaking how you understand whether there is something happening that goes beyond the individual’s fortunes, and I think it was right to do that. And that clause, as someone once called it socialism in one clause, which would have invited and possibly compelled organizations to measure movements of their employees and so on from the point of view of social social backgrounds, that would have been radical had it been initiated.
But we would also I think have understood some of the problems of that understanding of social mobility. To start with we would have been trying to measure aggregate trends. Now I think this works perfectly fine with immutable human characteristics, race and sex in particular. I’m in a category which we call Black British Caribbean and to all intents and purposes it will always be for the whole of my lifetime a factor in how I’m regarded and treated. This is more controversial but I think it’s also a factor in the way that I behave. Had I been something else I think I would have been a rather different kind of person. But it will certainly condition how other people behave towards me. And that’s true about class or cast. As Eliza Doodle said, “The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated.” But my ethnicity is part of my inheritance that I can’t really do anything about. I can’t change it. The fact of being the son of parents with a particular occupational background isn’t quite the same. Put crassly, I can’t change the way I look, but I could and have changed the way I speak. I don’t often talk about my own background in public for a range of reasons. The principle one being that it’s not just my background. When we talk about ourselves, we’re also talking about our families and others.
I’ve got to confess I’m mildly disapproving of the tendency in of people to share you know whether their parents were tool-makers or whatever it is with everybody as though that told you something very, very important about them but I don’t think it does, but let that rest that’s just my prejudice. But in this context I think it is important for me to set out some of the story because I think it helps to explain some of the things I want to suggest this morning. I was born in central London, the last of my parents’ children. I’m pretty far from the place into which I was born, not geographically but certainly socially. I’m the 10th of 10 children. My mother was the great granddaughter of a woman born into slavery. That woman’s daughter was a housemaid, her daughter was a seamstress. My mother was a seamstress and a housemaid. Not much social mobility there over the course of a century. My father on the other hand is very different. He was a son of an alcoholic rag and bone man whose name we barely know in our family because he disappeared virtually the moment my father was born. My father left school at 14 and he worked in docks, worked on railways, he was in the army during the war, guarding prisoners in the middle of what was then British Guiana, or called the ‘jungle’. He was later a laborer, worked on the railways again, and then worked for many years in the post office as a postman. He ended his job and his life quite differently. He ended his life in a white collar job in the United States. My parents had come to Britain in 1950, they left again in 1967, for reasons probably we don’t need to go into but anybody who knows the atmosphere of the United Kingdom at that time might understand why people would want to leave. He went to the United States. My parents went to the United States where they were just going to visit family. I have absolutely no doubt though this is not something we talk about particularly in the family that they were illegal immigrants and they overstayed their visas and so on. It happened that my father worked as a security guard on the campus at Columbia University. He went to night school, became a bookkeeper and for the first time in his life at the age of got a white collar job, and he was the bookkeeper with the title of ‘treasurer’ of a think tank on the campus at Columbia University and he did that for three years before he died at 61, rather typical age for a man of his time and background. But in contrast to my mother, quite a journey and he ended up as the person that I think he always hoped he would be.
So there’s a study in contrast, but these contrasts have consequences and from my family they’re good consequences. Of the nine of us who made it to adulthood, eight of us are university graduates. Our children are all university graduates. Most in this country, Russell Group graduates, in the United States where half the family lives, Ivy League, Colombia, MIT, John Hopkins. They have roles in education, health, business, law, professional services. Some of them are in new occupations, executive coaches, and I have no idea what that is. Influencers, I’ll come back to her later on. Lecturers in game theory. And when I say game theory, I mean video games. Is that even a job? Some of them I don’t understand. I suspect some of my nephews are spies. But the point I really want to make here is that we figuratively and literally speaking crossed the railway tracks inside three generations. And how did we do it? Well, in our case, we crossed an ocean. We literally crossed an ocean and in fact my parents crossed two oceans, and that’s one way to do it and some these days are choosing to go to Australia for example. But that isn’t available to most people, but it does invite us to reflect on a more expansive understanding of the drivers of social mobility than I think we might historically have done.
I want to say a few words about four what I think are four significant drivers. I’m going to ignore some of the traditional pathways, for example, marrying above yourself. Which I think I probably did. My wife and I argue about this. She says that being born in Romford is even more declasse than being born in Islington. But anyway, it gives us something to talk about on holiday. The point is you can’t legislate for that, as far as I know, and I’m not entirely sure you want to encourage it through public policy. So let me talk about four things that you can do something about and the jargon these days is a plan for change.
So here are four changes. You can change individual capabilities, and a lot of the thinking in this area goes into education. As I pointed out, my father made essentially an extraordinary transition in his life at an advanced what we would think of as an advanced age entirely through the acquisition of skills learned at night school. But we have a natural experiment that shows us the significance and the power of educational capability in this country and it probably is clearer than in any other country that I know and that is if you look at the story in the history of East African Asians in this country, it’s extraordinary. This is a group of people now several hundred thousand in number who pretty much turned up with not very much. Some carried their education with them, but by and large, their story is one of extraordinary success. And I’m not just talking about the multi-millionaires and the billionaires but the average person from that community who came whose parents or grandparents may have come with relatively little but who in two generations have progressed through the ranks of the administrative white collar classes to the professional classes largely through a commitment to education including for example and this is demonstrated by literally that people pay out of their pockets for private schooling. If you look at the numbers in independent day schools around London and Manchester and to some extent Birmingham, you will see they are disproportionately, and I mean by a multiple, full of people from that community many of whom are having their fees paid by parents who are working second and third jobs. So this is one route. But I think that the downside of that idea is that you have to have the culture. And I haven’t got time to go into it this morning, but we can talk about it if you want. There’s a very interesting explanation for why this is true about some ethnic groups in Amy Chua’s book, The Triple Package. But it is cultural, to some extent it is down to luck and chance. But I think it’s interesting that the Secretary of State for Education and probably next Deputy Prime Minister has been making the point in recent times that in this country we have a group which happens to be white and poor not white and working class by the way, we are talking about white and poor generally speaking I wish people would be more specific and accurate about what they’re saying. That is, if you like the contrast of the group I’ve just been speaking of. Can we learn from them? Is there a lesson to be learnt for poor white boys from the model of Rishi Sunnak? So one thing we can change is the individuals and at the heart of that is education.
Secondly, we can change the frame in which people operate. And what I mean by that is this: migration is one way of changing the frame in which you operate. You go somewhere different. You’re thought of differently. You can behave in a different way. You’re not locked in by history. There are of course some downsides to this and this can be true in terms of the way you move out of your community. And of course one of the central issues in this country, was far too many people have to find success away from the place that they grew up in. It’s a conundrum that I don’t think we have solved. I’m not even sure that we’ve begun to ask ourselves what do you do about that? The success in social mobility during the 1960s and 70s I think may have fooled us into thinking that there’s a sort of natural way in which you know boys and girls from the north can come south and they’ll become my friend Mel Melvin Brag or whatever, and that’s the answer. I think there’s a price to pay for this. In the United States, African-Americans stay close to home. There’s some good research which shows that there’s a reason they stay close to home because when they go somewhere else, they may get a first class degree, but they lose something of themselves and their connection to their own inheritance. And that matters. There’s a real value to that. There’s again, and I haven’t got time to go into it, but there’s endless anecdotage and also a little bit of research which says that there is a price to be paid if you are taken out of your cultural comfort zone. That by the way is why, for example, young Muslim women who are perfectly well qualified to go to Oxbridge or even to University College London will prefer to stay at a university in East London, because that’s home. And I think changing the frame for people’s will is important but there’s it’s difficult and there’s a price.
The third thing I want to put on your agenda is perhaps more difficult and it’s not to do with the people. It’s to do with what we think as a society is of value. Now we tend to value occupations by knowing how much money there is in concrete terms, but I think we also value occupations by status. And I got myself into an argument with an academic about plumbers and professors. It is probably true that the average professor still earns more than the average plumber. However, the master plumber is likely to earn something north of 75 or £80,000 a year. The professor or Head of Department is going to be doing pretty well if he or she hits that number. Now does that make that master plumber more valuable than a professor? Well at the moment in terms of our social norms that’s not right. We still think that the professors are smarter and cleverer. Well, you can debate that. But the point I really want to make here is that we’re going through a point of transition in which we may need to think about how we revalue what kind of work is worthwhile and this will be boosted by the intervention of AI. Imagine what happens amongst the ranks of doctors, the day when we grasp, and this will happen, the day surgery is done better by robots, because they’re more accurate, can draw on a wider range of studies, are more precise and there are no tremors. Does that make surgery less significant than general practice? I don’t know. But I think we need to think when we’re talking about social mobility, mobility to what? I mean, there’s an argument that says that AI will make some white collar occupations routine. It certainly will be in my business in writing and journalism and it will make some manual occupations specialist and professional. Who is going to be the priest of the future who holds secret knowledge? They won’t be journalists. They might be electricians and they might be mechanics. They might be plumbers. They could even be influencers. One of the things that my daughter and my nieces and nephews tease me with, is that when I get above myself, they remind me that I am not even anywhere near the most well-known person in my family. I have a niece who is an influencer who I think at last count has something like 2 million followers on TikTok. Now I love her to pieces but there is something slightly annoying about years of hard work and study being upstaged by the next generation; and even worse I not so long ago discovered that my daughter who works in fintech and is an executive coach has some of the same clients I do as I do. I recently discovered that they pay her more than I do for whatever it is she does, which I do not understand. But my point here is when we’re thinking about this issue of social mobility, I think we need to start factoring in what are you mobile from and to because we still think of occupation as much as the measure.
The last thing I just want to say of course is that the most important pathway is expansion of economic opportunity across the board. And I’ll make a very simple point here. In the 20th century amongst African-Americans, what was the single most significant change that transformed opportunities for African-Americans? It was not voting rights. It was not affirmative action. It was a minimum wage. A measure that was applied to everybody but was transformative for a particular category of person. So what do we do very quickly about all of these things?
Here are five things I think we need to do. First of all, I think we need to properly activate the measurement regime that we had in mind when we put that clause into the 2010 act. And that means employers measuring as well as pay gaps on ethnicity and sex, status gaps by background. Now, I know that there are arguments about whether your parents’ occupation at 14 is an adequate measure or not. Right now, it’s probably the best we’ve got, but there are people in this room who will have smarter ideas than I do, and at some point, we will find better measures, but let’s start somewhere. So, measurement.
Second, I think we need to open the opportunities to young people socially. Now this does mean mentoring. It does mean opportunities through university and so on. But I think we haven’t quite focused enough on what are the real barriers that discourage people and some of those barriers are rather subtle. When I started as a television producer I will tell you this goes back such a long time ago but I can tell you the fact I still remember it tells you what a deep impact it had on me. I was sitting talking to a group of colleagues about theme music for a particular program and we were discussing which kind of theme music worked with what programs and so on and somebody said the South Bank show Melvin show had great theme music in fact it had been arranged by Andrew Lloyd Webber it’s terrific and so on. And I said what is it and there was sort of silence in the room and everybody there was sort of slightly embarrassed. You suddenly realize that everybody else knows the answer to that question and they’re embarrassed that you don’t know the answer to that question. It turned out it was Paganini’s variations, but everybody else in the room knew that already. I didn’t. I think that we don’t pay enough attention to the kinds of knowledge and understanding and indeed behaviors that surround status in the professional world when we do our work to mentor and help young people. I think that’s a second thing we may need to pay more attention to.
Third thing, employers. It’s easy to cut human resources and god knows the human resources guys don’t make themselves popular. But right now we need more intelligence about human talent, not less. We need to understand how best to train people. We need to understand what works and what doesn’t work. And by all means get rid of some of the silliness. By all means stop the endless seminars telling people that they’re bigots of one kind or another. But employers need to put more effort into understanding their own people. As much effort into understanding how their own people can become productive as they put into how clients and customers can buy what they want to sell. And the reason that is important in relation to social mobility is that employers have to lead in trying to make it clear that we need to understand what qualities that people will bring to the workplace above the surface. What is their degree? How well do they speak? Or what accent do they speak and so on. We need employers to be much tougher on themselves in understanding their own people. I’ve said a bit about AI. I don’t want to repeat that. But the educational pathways that lead to advancement and progress are going to be massively disrupted by AI and we need to understand that better and that may be a job I think that government needs to put some muscle into some energy into, and not just leave it to professional firms to publish lists of what what professions are going to be up and down. And the last thing I want to do is this is a small thing and it’s a small thing that happens in my own company at Green Park where we do a lot of placement of executives. We put four or five hundred people in top jobs every year. We put something last year about 55% of our placements were female. A third were from ethnic minorities. I don’t think we measure enough actually the impact of background. So I don’t think we understand it in the way that we do race and sex but we need to do that.
But one of the things that we do in our company and that I think all employers could think about is that we have a rule that no decision that affects more than 1% of turnover can be made in a room that is not diverse. By which we mean there has to be more than one ethnicity in the room. There has to be more than one sex in the room. And maybe we need to think and others need to think about making sure that on those big decisions there is at least somebody who doesn’t have a degree, by which I mean hasn’t been acculturated by having gone through the three or four years of university in the room, because there are lots of different ways of looking at your decision- making and I sometimes think that those of us who have had that experience of the graduate world and professional world lose the capacity to see the world as others see it. And indeed by the way, to see ourselves as we are seen by the majority of the population. Thank you
.