When I was growing up, the baby-boomer generation that I was part of was marked by its optimism. Britain might have been a country managing the decline of empire, but everything seemed possible.
In my school, which served a largely working-class part of London, we took it as natural that one of our former pupils was the head of the civil service. There was a vigorous climate of opportunity for all — what the academics called social mobility. But what was true for much of the second half of the last century is less and less true in the first half of this one.
A youngster born into the bottom quarter of society half a century ago was more likely to work their way up to a higher economic class than those making their way today. When it comes to opportunities for the least well off, our society is flatlining.
This does not just represent a loss of opportunity for young people and a tragedy for the families and individuals trapped at the bottom of the pile. It also represents an enormous loss of talent and creativity for our nation. It is no coincidence that the decline in social mobility has been accompanied by a fall in Britain’s economic competitiveness from fourth to 10th under Labour on the international league table.
For Conservatives the traditional emphasis on personal responsibility for your own career and standard of living is not enough to face the challenges of these new circumstances. We as a party must develop an alternative argument, and that is what I want to begin to do here.
First, let me explain what I think the routes to wealth and wider success are and why they are blocked.
The first route is education and training. Today too many children in state schools are failing adequately to learn the basics, which are the foundation of any career. This represents a serious barrier for those who do not have the blessing of exceptional ability or a wealthy family.
But it’s not just school. Our whole national attitude to education is to blame. There seems to be an idea that human value can only be measured in exam results — and the longer you spend in formal, academic education the more you are worth.
It didn’t use to be like that. Once, the labour market itself offered an alternative to formal education as a route to the top via apprenticeships or management training. The brightest boy in my year left school at 16. Not because he was feckless or unambitious, but because he wanted to be a banker and he wanted to get on with it.
These days I have heard professions boast they are “graduate only”. We seem to be deliberately creating an educational glass ceiling to social progress. Of course it is a good thing that many young people are gaining the benefits of a university education, but are we really intending to tell those that choose not to take this route that they are shutting the door for ever on their own progress? Are we really telling youngsters who do poorly in their GCSEs that their first test is their last chance?
The second route to wealth is working for a large firm. Yet the tax and benefits system acts as a significant barrier here. The current arrangement of tax credits subsidises low-paid work and therefore penalises career progression. Marginal tax rates on overtime run at up to 70% — an estimated 2m people don’t do overtime, though they would like to, because it simply isn’t worth it. This is a shameful waste of energy and potential.
The third route to wealth is starting your own business. Here the sheer weight and complexity of business regulation is a serious barrier. Young adults who are practically minded will tend towards a vocational career, perhaps as a plumber or builder. They certainly do not take up plumbing out of a love of doing paperwork.
Today they are expected to understand the intricacies of tax law and, if they hire anyone, employment law too — not to mention the welfare system that employers have to administer on the government’s behalf. Red tape strangles opportunity and initiative just as it strangles enterprise.
The fourth route to wealth is the property ladder. The ability to trade up one’s principal asset over the course of a generation or more was a key factor in social mobility. But today the property ladder is losing its bottom rungs. High house prices are partly to blame. But one reason for that is the decline in opportunities to exercise the right to buy. Council tenants’ maximum discount has fallen from around £50,000 to as low as £16,000 while many housing association tenants have no right to buy at all.
I recently visited the council estate where I lived as a child in Wandsworth, south London. To my delight I found it clean, tidy, graffiti free, low crime and well cared for by its residents. The reason, I found, was that thanks to the right to buy, my old estate is now 70% owner occupied. And it is not 70% clean and tidy but 100%. In a very tangible way families helping themselves has helped their neighbours too.
I believe that the same natural relationship between individual aspiration and social wellbeing operates in reverse. We have a social responsibility to deliver individual opportunity. And this means concerted action to remove the barriers to mobility.
I am undertaking to make 2007 the year in which the Conservative party gets to grips with social mobility. I am setting up a taskforce, which will include people with experience of dealing with the barriers to opportunity that face the young, to investigate in more detail why social mobility is declining and what can be done to reverse the decline.
I grew up in the 1960s, an era — despite retrospective mythmaking — of strong social responsibility. At the same time the welfare state was new, and it was working. We didn’t know it then but these two phenomena, a strong society and an effective state, were like two trains lined up momentarily at the same station: since then they have begun moving apart.
Social responsibility has declined, and the state has become less effective at dealing with the diverse and complicated needs of the public. We must recover our sense of social responsibility and redefine government so that it no longer acts as a barrier to mobility.
David Davis is the shadow home secretary
