Mayors have a track record of leadership at times of national crisis. Richard Cobden in 1840s Manchester, Joseph Chamberlain in late 19th-century Birmingham and Fiorello La Guardia, who ran New York from 1934 to 1945, focused on local problems but developed solutions that went on to shape national policy, demonstrating how innovation at a local level can provide answers to much bigger national questions. Could we be at a similar turning point today?
Drawing on his experience in Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham is setting out plans to rewire and reset the country. His focus on regional disparities is surely the right one. It is particularly disappointing, then, that the government has decided to abolish the Social Mobility Commission at a time when these questions of place and opportunity are becoming more pressing. The Commission has long argued that the defining contemporary challenges of the UK relate to geographical disparities. Every indicator and measure of opportunity is better understood from the vantage point of place. Where people grow up, live and work matters profoundly to the opportunities available to them.
These geographical differences require a different theory and understanding of social mobility from conventional approaches. The usual model is an EDI one, confining analysis to the distribution of opportunity across socio-economic groups. It then reduces social mobility to a problem of elite composition. This is why so much attention is focused on access to top universities and employers, and why the social mobility superhighway runs overwhelmingly to London.
But social mobility is part of economic and social production and reproduction. Viewed from this perspective, there is a clear link between social mobility, growth and innovation, and between churn at the top and the wider benefits this should bring for everyone. Social mobility is not simply about who reaches the top; it is also about the kind of economy that creates opportunities, how widely they are distributed and whether benefits extend beyond those who secure the most prestigious positions.
You can trace the origins of this view to Adam Smith, Richard Cobden and Joseph Schumpeter. You can also see shared preoccupations with more recent Nobel prize winners in economics. Joel Mokyr’s work on 19th-century Britain and Philippe Aghion’s analysis of post-industrial innovation and ‘creative destruction’ provide reference points. Open elites, where competition drives innovation, bring benefits that spread widely. Closed elites become rent-extracting, self-serving and divorced from the wider social good. The distinction matters because the openness of institutions and economies affects not only who succeeds within them but also their capacity to innovate and generate wider prosperity.
Arguably, the UK corresponds more closely to elite closure. Productivity is low, competition compromised, innovation slow, wealth concentrated and investment directed towards assets. London continues to do well, but the Dick Whittington path to finance and professional services is becoming harder for those without family help. They pay heavily in tax and student loan repayments, yet cannot afford a house or family. For almost everyone else, outside of London, it is a struggle to keep up, never mind catch up. Many have become the people and places ‘left behind’, dependent on central government largesse and watching a doom loop of local decline.
The UK has not had a social mobility strategy since 2011, when the coalition government published Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers. It represented conventional thinking: improving early years, closing the disadvantage gap in schools and widening access to higher education. These factors matter, but without the wider framework we advocate, they will be insufficient. Our work shows there is a case for a new, place-based strategy focused on innovation and growth, measured by openness at the top and the tangible benefits delivered to all. Such an approach would put the economic circumstances of places alongside the characteristics of individuals when thinking about opportunity.
Andy Burnham’s arrival presents a challenge and an opportunity. Our focus had been on developing the case for a place-based approach, working with a government whose progress on devolution was cautious and whose engagement with social mobility was strangely detached.
Starmer’s Labour showed an appetite for EDI initiatives, such as restricting the civil service internship programme to those who had a working-class parent at 14. Beyond that, social mobility was never an explicit policy ambition and there was no plan.
The argument for place-based policy is now turbo-charged. Rewiring the State has set out a radical framework for devolution, bringing decision-making out of Whitehall and closer to communities. It has provoked debate about pace and capacity and concerns about services in early years, education and skills, where the balance between national and devolved responsibility needs careful management. Welfare is not yet part of the debate. But the case for place-based solutions has been won. The government has made it more robustly than the Social Mobility Commission ever could.
But if social mobility needs devolution, is the opposite also true? Does devolution need social mobility? Should the Burnham government make it more central to its thinking than it was under the previous leadership?
Much depends on whether the government can eschew the EDI model and help shape a different one. When we visit partners and stakeholders across the private, public and voluntary sectors, there is instinctive support for our approach. Our evidence also suggests it is more closely aligned with public perceptions of social mobility and what matters to the general public. That matters if social mobility is to become something understood as relevant to communities across the country, rather than principally to those competing for a relatively small number of elite opportunities.
But does social mobility add anything to the developing model for a reset UK? Devolution is not an end in itself but a means of addressing growth and reform, reversing decline and helping places reclaim a sustainable future. Social mobility has much to offer in this regard. It provides a framework for measuring and evaluating ‘inclusive’ or ‘good’ growth, giving local leaders a way of balancing priorities. It captures what is needed for an open economy: porous elites, minimal barriers to entry and wealth created through competitive business, start-ups, enterprise and high-skilled occupations, with a choice of routes to success. These are all parts of the social mobility story and, importantly, they can be measured.
Equally, social mobility can provide the targets and measures places need to ensure that the benefits of growth are widely shared. Our evidence suggests that while most people move into a different socio-economic group from their parents, there is a ‘sticky bottom’ of people who appear stuck. This group, which we call the ‘truly disadvantaged’, frequently has poor outcomes across education, health, employment, housing, family life and early years, but there is limited evidence of policies targeted towards them that are genuinely effective. One strength of devolution could be to measure its impact on the wellbeing and outcomes of the most disadvantaged, rather than relying only on aggregate measures of economic success. Social mobility provides the framework for doing this across education, employment, income, occupation, housing, wealth and health.
Place-based policy may be the way forward for social mobility, but there is also a strong case for making social mobility central to the devolution revolution. It provides a unique vantage point for seeing growth through the lens of real people, enabling places to judge how to balance economic disruption and community wellbeing.
It does mean seeing social mobility differently and taking it out of the EDI straightjacket. If we can do that, we can make it centrally relevant to the challenges of our time.
In that respect, it might help our new Prime Minister follow Cobden, Chamberlain and La Guardia in showing that local innovators can drive national solutions.Their examples remind us that ideas developed to solve the problems of particular places can ultimately have consequences far beyond them. At another moment of economic and social change, devolution gives Britain an opportunity to do the same again.
This article first appeared in Spotlight on Economic Growth: Rethinking New Paths to Prosperity
Content from our partners
Related
