Starmer lacks ‘coherent’ social mobility plan, says advisory body chair

Keir Starmer has no “coherent” strategy to tackle entrenched inequalities harming the life chances of millions of people, the government’s social mobility commissioner has said.

A major official report warned last week that young adults in Britain’s former industrial heartlands were being left behind as a result of failed or abandoned promises by successive governments.

The Social Mobility Commission (SMC), a government advisory body, said big cities such as Manchester, Edinburgh and Bristol were starting to thrive but that opportunities were “over-concentrated”.

In a Guardian interview, the commission’s chair, Alun Francis, urged Starmer to outline a bold vision to tackle “the defining social mobility challenge of our generation”.

He said: “We have a government that talks quite a lot about social mobility, but mainly about individuals – often about [the] social mobility of themselves or their colleagues … But what we don’t have is a coherent approach to social mobility as a useful concept that you can build a strategy around.”

Francis’s warning comes at a moment of mounting pressure on the government over its approach to social mobility after last week’s SMC report described poorer childhood conditions, fewer job opportunities and a lack of growth in former industrial communities, and as new figures showed the sharpest rise in youth unemployment for three years. With almost 1 million young people now outside education, work or training, critics say the government has failed to articulate a plan to brighten their prospects before the next election.

Francis praised government policies on devolution and housing, but said welfare reform and other proposals had been “stop-start”.

“We’ve got other policies like growth, educational improvement where we’re just not sure where we’re going,” he said.

Francis said Labour’s skills policy and its industrial strategy were a step forward but that there was “no overarching narrative” to pull all these strands together.

Without an overall strategy, he said, the government would “struggle to address some of those issues and have a clear-headed view about what we might do to improve things”.

He also warned that without a “universal view” of what social mobility means, it risked being subsumed by diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies – an agenda that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has characterised as “woke” and promised to dismantle.

“To some degree it’s dropped into being a kind of part of DEI because it does have some of those aspects,” he said. “But [social mobility] isn’t really a DEI policy. It’s more about an economic and social policy that’s about bringing the benefits to everybody.”

The SMC’s annual report, published last week, came as official statistics showed an increase of 85,000 young people unemployed in the three months to October.

The risk of not being in education, employment and training (Neet) is more than double if you come from a disadvantaged background and have low qualifications. The proportion of Neets is highest in the north-east and north-west of England, followed by the East Midlands and West Midlands.

Alan Milburn, the former health secretary, said this was a “national outrage … a social injustice and an economic catastrophe”. He will lead a major review into the causes of young people out of work or education, it was announced last week.

Francis, who was appointed by the Cabinet Office in January 2023, said successive governments had become too focused on “quick fixes” and the frenetic pressures of Westminster, leading to “constant changes of direction”. He added: “Without that narrative on social mobility, what you tend to have is lots of disconnected aspects of policy without a way of bringing them together into one coherent whole.”

A government spokesperson said: “Nearly 1 million young people in Britain are not in education, employment or training – and that number has been rising for four years.

“This is a crisis we cannot ignore, and we have asked Alan Milburn to help us build a system that supports young people and understand the root causes of youth unemployment.

“We are bringing forward the biggest employment reforms in a generation and Alan Milburn’s review will ensure every young person is provided an opportunity to make something of their lives.”