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Social Mobility and the Professions

I welcome both the Minister to her new responsibilities, which include this important subject of social mobility, and this debate. I do not know whether she planned to have a debate on this subject within two days of becoming the Minister responsible for it, but it is welcome that she is at the Dispatch Box to speak on it. The right hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn) is also in the Chamber, and he is leading the independent review. The work that has been produced, both originally by the Cabinet Office's strategy unit—that was on social mobility as a whole—and more recently by the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions, is excellent. The amount of empirical evidence assembled in those reports is fantastic, and I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman is the right man to push forward this agenda. We read in the papers that he got his party's Chief Whip to apologise for having suggested that he was a rebel plotting the downfall of the Prime Minister last week; we note that nobody else has had such a statement from the Chief Whip. It is good to see the right hon. Gentleman in the Chamber to debate this important subject. Our starting point is the statistics that have led to an extraordinarily lively academic debate about the decline in social mobility between children born in 1958 and those born in 1970. Although the evidence since 1970 is debated, it seems clear to me that, despite one or two claims to the contrary, social mobility has been flatlining since 1970. The summary of the November 2008 document got it about right when it stated:""Broadly, social mobility is no greater or less since 1970"." Something I welcomed in the Minister's statement was that she did not try to argue that social mobility was improving again; it might be, but we do not have the evidence for that. One of the leading experts, Paul Gregg, who did work on children who were born in 1990 and took their GCSEs 15 years later, said that there was not enough evidence to claim with any confidence that there had been an improvement. Although we hope things are getting better, we do not have the evidence to say that at the moment. The panel's reports are fascinating. The Minister rather dangerously strayed into the territory of access to different professions. As I do not believe that there are any journalists sitting up there in the Press Gallery, let us be clear about what the figures show. The table on page 2, which shows the backgrounds of professionals born in 1958 compared with those of professionals born in 1970—again, those two longitudinal studies are used—is about the most fascinating one in the report. The table measures how much more affluent their families were in comparison with the average family income. In some professions—teaching, for example—there has been, if anything, a tiny improvement. For those joining other professions, the family backgrounds of those born in 1970 were much more relatively affluent than the backgrounds of those born in 1958. The biggest single change was found to have taken place in journalism: journalists born in 1958 were seen to have come from backgrounds where the family income was roughly the same as the average, whereas for those born in 1970 a massive gap had opened up. I am looking forward to the Minister coming to the Chamber when we have the panel's report in mid-July and telling us what she is going to do about access to journalism. As she takes on the journalists' profession, we will be watching sympathetically from a distance. I was also struck by the material on page 45, which again shows the rise of requirements for graduate entry—another powerful piece of evidence from this very useful report. We look forward to the final report that the Minister will receive from the right hon. Member for Darlington. We have done some research of our own on social mobility, including an analysis of evidence from the Office for National Statistics about the backgrounds of people who go to university. We did a micro-analysis, based on the neighbourhoods that those people came from, and we concluded that the figures convey a stark message. Despite hundreds of millions of pounds being spent on widening participation, the figures still show that in the richest, most affluent areas of the country six in 10 young people go to university, but in the poorest, most deprived neighbourhoods three in 10 go to university. So there are still enormous gaps in the opportunities for young people to go to university, and it is hard to improve social mobility with that bottleneck in the access to university. We are also concerned about the prospects for the poorest young people. They have an increased risk of being not in education, employment or training—NEET. We are, sadly, in tough economic times with high unemployment, and it is worth remembering the evidence that a period of unemployment, especially when very young, can scar someone for life. People's lifetime earning prospects are affected, and it seems to affect the kind of jobs they have 20 years later.