Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The author chairs the Social Mobility Commission and is Principal and Chief Executive of Blackpool and The Fylde College.
I witnessed the Tottenham riots in 1985, lived in Salford during the 1992 riots and went on to lead a school desegregation project in Oldham after the 2001 riots. I watched the 2011 riots unfold in Manchester and now, in 2024, I am working in Blackpool, one of the areas involved in recent riots.
We shouldn’t oversimplify, but there seems to have been a shift in this period from urban unrest linked to race and equality of opportunity, mainly in large cities, to social friction linked to immigration in coastal towns and resorts. This points to a new geography of disadvantage, something that Social mobility The Commission has been gathering evidence on this for some time. The 2022 Levelling Up white paper was the first formal exploration of this new landscape. It acknowledged 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 concentration of disadvantage in the poorest places. Private sector investment has dried up, big employers have closed, traditional jobs have disappeared and there is little to fill the gap. Our higher education system provides a route for the most academically able to “get out and work their way up” but beyond this, places and their communities have become almost totally dependent on welfare, public services and the “everyday” economy.
Less well known is how the invisible hand of disorganised public policy has exacerbated this process. Examples include the expansion of private rental financed through housing subsidies, private children’s homes and accommodation for asylum seekers and refugees. These often involve substantial payments to private sector partners that add no value and are often of substandard quality. This has not helped attract investment; local leaders must choose between managing disadvantage or growing the economy. Few can do both.
This is combined with the second issue, which relates to the British white poor. It is important to be specific here: this group is not the same as the white “working class”. As we show in our State of the Nation Report for the past year, There are significant 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 work and out of work or on welfare, and less likely to go to university.
Anyone who has lived or worked in poor communities knows that they are complex. Some people will stay there temporarily, others will remain stuck. The chances of moving might be better, but they are not discouraging: 11 percent of top-level professionals and 21 percent of lower-level professionals begin life in the lower working-class group. And 70 percent of this group will move up to some degree.
But who is most likely to thrive? In terms of long-term absolute upward mobility (those whose parents are in the lowest occupational group and who are employed in the highest occupational group), individuals of Chinese and Indian origin rank first and second. White Britons as a whole are in the middle, but on key indicators of educational attainment, disadvantaged white Britons are near the bottom. Relative mobility, which measures the strength of the link between parents’ and children’s occupations, is most fluid among ethnic minorities and most rigid among white Britons. Prospects for educational and occupational upward mobility are strongest in London.
Solutions are scarce or ineffective. Policies tend to lose focus on the most disadvantaged or to propose one-dimensional responses. limit of the benefit for two childrenFor example, education may be a good policy to alleviate poverty in large families, but improving their opportunities requires a more comprehensive approach to people.
Calls to “bring back Sure Start” overlook its limitations. A recent study Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies A link has been established between access to these early years centres and improved GCSE grades. This is encouraging, but it was only significant for non-white children. “Making schools more welcoming to the less well off” is another simplistic solution, which ignores the fact that some poor children do well academically, particularly those from ethnic minorities. What are they doing differently? What exactly is happening in the communities and families that are always left last?
There is no single policy or intervention that can reverse this problem. We argue that the starting point for improving opportunity must be a growing and innovative economy that addresses regional disparities, but this must be connected to broader local approaches, focused on communities and families, and a genuine willingness to understand what holds back the white poor.