I witnessed the Tottenham riot in 1985, lived in Salford during the riots in 1992 and went to lead a school desegregation project in Oldham after the unrest in 2001. I saw the 2011 riots unfold in Manchester and now, in 2024, work in Blackpool — one of the areas involved in recent disturbances.
We should not oversimplify, but there seems to have been a shift over this period from urban unrest linked to race and equal opportunity, mainly in big cities, to social friction linked to immigration in towns and seaside resorts. This points to a new geography of disadvantage, something the Social Mobility Commission has been collating evidence on for some time. The Levelling Up white paper of 2022 was the first formal exploration of this new landscape. It recognised how interconnected factors shape the decline of places and how difficult it is to reverse the downward spiral. But it was weak on two important issues.
First, the clustering of disadvantage in the poorest places. Private sector investment has dried up, large employers have closed, traditional jobs have gone and there is little to fill the vacuum. Our higher education system provides a route for “moving out to move up” for the most academically able but, beyond this, places and their communities have been left almost entirely dependent on welfare, public services and the “everyday” economy.
Less familiar is how the invisible hand of disorganised public policy has exacerbated this process. Examples include the expansion of private renting funded via housing benefit, private children’s homes and accommodation for asylum seekers and refugees. These usually involve substantial payments to private sector partners who add no value and are often substandard. This has not helped attract investment; local leaders must choose between managing disadvantage or growing the economy. Few can do both.
This combines with the second issue, which relates to the white British poor. It is important to be specific here — this group is not the same as the white “working class”. As we showed in our State of the Nation report last year, there are important differences in outcomes between the “upper” and “lower” working class. At the bottom is a group that includes adults and young people with low or no qualifications, who are more likely to be in and out of work or dependent on welfare, and the least likely to go to university.
Anyone who has lived or worked in poor communities knows they are complex. Some individuals will be there temporarily, others are stuck. The chances of moving out could be better but are not dismal: 11 per cent of higher professionals and 21 per cent of lower professionals start life in the lower working-class group. And 70 per cent of the lower working-class group will be upwardly mobile to some degree.
But who are the most likely to prosper? In terms of long range, absolute upward mobility — those whose parents come from the lowest occupational group being employed in the highest occupational group — individuals from Chinese and Indian backgrounds come first and second. The white British as a whole come in the middle, but on key educational attainment indicators, disadvantaged white Britons come near the bottom. Relative mobility, measuring the strength of the link between parental and child occupations, is more fluid among ethnic minorities and more rigid among the white British. The prospects of upward educational and occupational mobility are strongest in London.
Solutions are either in short supply or ineffective. Policies tend to lose focus on the most disadvantaged or propose one-dimensional answers. Lifting the two-child benefit cap, for example, may be a good policy for alleviating poverty in larger families. But to improve their opportunities requires a more rounded approach to individuals.
Demands to “Bring back Sure Start” overlook its limitations. A recent Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis established a link between access to these early years centres and improved GCSE grades. This is encouraging, but it was only significant for non-white children. “Make schools more responsive to the under-resourced” is another simplistic solution — ignoring the fact that some poor children do well academically, especially ethnic minorities. What are they doing differently? What exactly is happening in the communities and families that always come last?
There is no single policy or intervention to turn this problem around. We argue that the starting point for improving opportunities must be a growing, innovative economy, addressing regional disparities. But this must connect with wider place-based approaches, focused on communities and families, and a genuine willingness to understand what holds the white poor back.
You can also read the full article on the Financial Times website.