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Sir Keir Starmer does not have a “coherent approach to social mobility”, the government’s social mobility commissioner has said.
Alun Francis, a top adviser to the government, told the Guardian that there was no “overarching narrative” to pull various policy strands together and called on the prime minister to set out a clearer strategy.
A report by the commission released last week warned that “extreme regional disparities exist” in the UK, with many former industrial and mining areas worst affected.
“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,” Francis said.
“But what we don’t have is a coherent approach to social mobility as a useful concept that you can build a strategy around.”
While praising individual policies on housing and skills, he said other proposals had been “stop-start”, while almost one million young people are now outside education, work or training.
“We’ve got other policies like growth, educational improvement where we’re just not sure where we’re going,” Francis said.
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”.
Among the conclusions of week’s report were that a child’s family background still heavily shapes their education level and future life chances in the UK. It also said there were “extreme regional disparities” within the country.
A government spokesperson called the number of young people outside education, work or training a crisis that couldn’t be ignored and said a review by Alan Milburn would help build a system that ensured every young person had an opportunity to make something of their lives.
The report listed North East of England, Yorkshire and the Humber, and the West Midlands as facing “enduring disadvantages”, while former mining areas in Wales and Scotland are also “notably disadvantaged”.
However, new areas outside London with “favourable conditions for innovation and growth” include Aberdeen, Brighton, Bristol, Chester, Edinburgh, Oxfordshire, Reading and West Berkshire, the report said.
It also noted that almost half of young people aged 25 to 29 years were in professional occupations between 2022 and 2024 – up from 36% between 2014 and 2016.
But people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds “don’t benefit as much from these opportunities as their peers”, it said.
