IPPR North Event
The IPPR North seminar last week - ‘Opportunity Society - Improving Social Mobility in the North’ - which featured David Miliband as the key note speaker.
A brief report for the next issue of Policy World:
In what they describe as a ‘unique venture’, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), last year opened an off-shoot of their organisation in Newcastle - branded IPPR North - and, in so doing, became the first of the mainstream think-tanks to establish a significant presence in one of the English regions.
Part of the motivation for doing so was likely to be an ambition to tap into the expanding regional level policy networks emerging as plans to create the new North East Assembly gathered pace. However, for IPPR North - and the Blair government too - the North East’s rejection of proposals to create England’s first devolved assembly must have come as something of a shock. What’s more, this was no close run event: almost four-fifths of votes in November’s referendum were cast against the proposed assembly. Much of the popular commentary attributed the result to a general disenchantment with politics and politicians and a belief amongst voters that more government would do little to improve the lot of the region. Yet, one of the driving forces behind the creation of IPPR North - and its location in Newcastle - was the very fact that the North East is a noticeable poor relation according to most indicators of economic and social well-being. The 2004 Indices of Multiple Deprivation study highlighted the challenges for social policy in the North East well, the region being the most deprived of those covered by the study with more than a third of its Super Output Areas (SOAs) falling into the 20% of most deprived SOAs in England. While the North East has long been one of the nation’s less well off regions, what is particularly for the area’s policy makers worrying is the trajectory of change: the North East is now the poorest of all regions in the UK and, as the IPPR themselves have noted, if current trends continue then the average worker in there will receive just half the national average income by 2020.
It was against this backdrop of a need to tackle declining relative social and economic well-being but doing so from within existing political structures that this seminar took place. Offering their thoughts for debate were keynote speaker David Miliband, MP for the region’s South Shields constituency and Minister for the Cabinet Office and, as respondent, Professor Steve Machin of LSE & UCL.
Miliband argued that ‘increasing social mobility while promoting social equality is the ultimate test for a progressive government’. His talk had three key, inter-related, themes. Firstly, that improved social mobility must be central to any agenda for increasing fairness and improving economic performance. Secondly, that the Blair government had prepared the groundwork in such a way that the prospects for improving social mobility are actually greater than at any time since the Second World War. Finally, that there was a special need to promote social mobility - and to nurture ambition and aspiration - in the north.
Fleshing out his perspective, he suggested there were four key drivers of social mobility. Firstly, there is early childhood development - in other words, those who are disadvantaged in their early years are more likely to be disadvantaged later in life. Secondly, there is education. He suggested that as the economy has shifted from an industrial to a post-industrial phase, the importance of qualifications has increased enormously. In particular, he pointed to the 50% increase in the relative returns to university degrees since the early 1980s, despite a significant rise in the number of graduates in the same period. Thirdly, he highlighted the labour market, suggesting the past 25 years had seen opportunities for those at the bottom of the market disappear as the labour market polarised. Added to this was the trap of worklessness for many families in some of the old industrial regions of the north. Finally, he pointed to capital ownership. Assets, he argued, were the essential foundation on which people could build their lives. However, he also suggested that social capital had a key role to play here, communities being key in shaping aspirations and setting norms.
Having outlined the drivers of social mobility, he argued that the scale of the challenge should not be underestimated, but claimed that the Blair government had made considerable progress in addressing these same drivers. In looking to address childhood poverty, increase investment in education, expand employment opportunities and address asset ownership by investing in deprived communities and through measures such as the Baby Bond, the government were aiming to tackle barriers to social mobility in their efforts to create an ‘opportunity society’. He argued that, ultimately, there were good reasons to be positive because ‘progress is cumulative’ and that, having laid the ground in their first two terms, we would see Labour ‘restore the social contract of progress from one generation to the next’ if re-elected for a third term.
Responding, Machin offered a more cautious view. Drawing on analysis of cohort studies, he argued there were clear signs that social mobility had decreased very significantly in recent years and pointed to the growing evidence of widening educational inequality in the UK too. Given this, he suggested the emphasis on education as a route to promoting mobility should be a cause for concern, arguing that the long term picture has been one of the middle class ‘colonising’ ever higher levels of the education system in order to cement their privileged position in the professions.
What was curiously lacking in the debate, however, was what might be specifically done in the North East to assist its development or, indeed, what it is that might be presently lacking to leave it in such a relatively disadvantaged position. Machin throughout spoke in very general terms about the UK as a whole and while Miliband’s team had produced figures showing how the Blair government had addressed some of the drivers of social mobility in the region - the number of unemployed and long-term unemployed now and during the 1980s for instance (down by two-thirds and four-fifths respectively) - he had little to say on how the policy agenda for the North East might differ from that nationally other than to argue in very general terms that a culture of aspiration must be fostered in the region.
However, several of those speaking from the floor did point towards some of the more deep seated drivers of social (im)mobility in the region that perhaps require more fundamental responses than are presently envisaged. Most notable were exchanges concerning the impact of deindustrialisation on a regional economy that was (and is) one of the most industrially based in the UK. While it was agreed that New Labour’s policies had gone some way to addressing the high levels of unemployment that resulted from the rapid decline of many of the region’s staple industries in the 1980s and early 1990s, a number of speakers argued that there were far fewer opportunities for advancement up a ‘career ladder’ in the more service based occupations that had replaced them. Added to this, according to some, was a relative lack of labour market opportunities for those with higher level skills that fuelled an outward migration of many of the region’s better qualified workers.
But the elephant in the room that no-one mentioned was devolution: with no institutional mechanism for promoting a North East specific agenda, some of the impetus behind a North East specific debate had, perhaps, diminished. Indeed, whether the tenor of the discussion would have differed much had the seminar taken place under the aegis of the national IPPR and in London rather than Newcastle was a moot point.
