The claim
“Labour, despite 13 years of government, billions of pounds of investment and a plethora of initiatives, schemes and credits, appears to have failed to move the needle on social mobility.”
Nick Clegg, speech on social mobility, 18 August 2010
The analysis
A lot of rubbish has been talked in the past on Labour’s social mobility record – not least by David Cameron.
Today, though, Clegg seems to have done his homework, and makes a more measured claim.
Social mobility is a measurement of how someone’s career and life chances are determined by the job their parents did. In a society with high social mobility, the sons of cleaners and factory workers would go on to be doctors and lawyers. But many professions are dominated by the middle classes (think public school boys Cameron and Clegg running the country).
Although social mobility improved after the second world war, we know that things went downhill for children born in 1970. These kids were more likely to be affected by how well-off their parents were, than children born in 1958 (these are the two years for which comprehensive data was collected).
But did that downward trend continue? Researchers at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) also looked at the children of parents born in 1958 and in 1970 – so the next generation on from the previous research. These kids were born, on average, in 1985 and 1999.
In 2007, the academics looked at the children’s test scores and behaviour – things that are known to give a reasonable indication of later achievements – and compared these with how their parents had done. Their analysis found no evidence of a continued fall in social mobility – but no evidence that things were getting better, either.
That tallies with Clegg’s claim today – although the needle has stopped going down lately, it hasn’t jumped up. Or as Alan Milburn, the new government social mobility czar, put it last year, the “long-running decline in social mobility has bottomed out”.
But one of the problems with all this is that social mobility is tricky to measure. To really say with certainty how well Blair and Brown’s babies end up doing, we’d have to wait until well after the coalition’s term of government is a memory. Even a child born in 1997 won’t start a graduate career for another decade.
As well as this uncertainty, Dr Jo Blanden, one of the CEP researchers, said it wasn’t clear whether the coalition would do better.
“Clegg’s speech suggests his long-term goal is complete social mobility, which is ridiculously ambitious,” she told FactCheck. “We do know that a more equal society leads to greater social mobility – so there are questions about how the coalition will make society more equal at the same time as making cuts.”
The verdict
The difficulty in measuring social mobility with accuracy – not to mention the length of time that’s needed in order to give context to any research – means that while the deputy prime minister’s statement is on the right track it will be some time before we can say with confidence that Labour’s record in this area has failed outright.
