Effective measures to address social mobility and inequality are politically unpopular

A great deal is spoken about equality and, as a result, we have two concepts that are seen as core to the resolution of inequalities: social mobility and income redistribution. In the case of the latter, we've tended to look at redistribution in terms of social class but now there is a fashionable concern that that we should be looking at intergenerational inequalities:

But while there are strong grounds for optimism in some areas, pessimism dominates overall. Pessimists about young adults’ chances of improving on their parents’ lives outnumber optimists by two-to-one. That marks a dramatic, and very rapid, turnaround in outlook. As recently as 2003, optimists outnumbered pessimists by nearly four-to-one. The gloom that has settled across our society since then is common across advanced economies, though Britain is more pessimistic than most.

The Resolution Foundation's work is pretty comprehensive, so it's disappointing when their resolution to the problem identified (today's young people having a better life than their parents) is to give them £10,000 - collected by taxing the existing older population. For me this illustrates the problem we have with developing political solutions to core social problems like equality - the winners in the game of inequality these days want solutions that do not mean them giving up their advantage. You might be able to sell them the Resolution Foundation's bung (although the track record of political responses to inheritance taxes aren't good - as Ed Milliband and Theresa May have found out to their cost) but it really does little or nothing to address the central concern that young people won't be rich enough to buy a stake in our society.

The same applies to social mobility. This is pretty much the subject of Robert Putnam's Our Kids where he explores the barriers to social advancement faced by American young people - driven less by race or location and more by a reborn social class divide (Putnam uses parental education as a proxy so you could argue it's a test of education effect rather than class effect). It's hard to cram a whole book into a sentence or two but, it seems to me that Putnam's findings - for all that we can't get a perfect transfer to UK circumstances - are a better reflection of the social realities facing our next generation than those from the Resolution Foundation.

The problem for the Resolution Foundation is less that working class kids are falling further and further behind middle class kids because of collapsing social capital (essentially Putnam's argument) and more that middle class kids can't afford to buy the assets - typically houses - that their parents were able to buy. For sure the report talks of pay stagnation and job insecurity but its primary thrust is that the resolution of the inequality (ie young people are less able to buy assets than their parents' or grandparents' generation) comes via higher taxes on wealth and specifically real estate wealth.

Not only do I think that the Resolution Foundation's answer is overcomplicated, state-driven and divisive, I'm also pretty sure it won't work. Young people may, at the end of it be a little better off but giving them £10,000 on their 25th birthday isn't going to get most of them onto the housing ladder. Moreover, the Resolution Foundation's proposals for dramatic hikes in property taxes will benefit squeezed local council budgets far more than they will the housing options of young people. And local councils - at least if what they say is a guide - are more interested in building council houses for rent than they are in helping young people buy houses. The result of the report's policies will be some cheery councillors not happier young people - this is not progress.

The problem we have is that the most obvious policy response to the problems of intergenerational inequality and social mobility are not politically easy to deliver. These might include:

Scrapping the strategic planning system including the 'green belt' - nearly everyone says there are too few houses, allowing people to build more homes seems an obvious solution. What would a world without planning look like?

Replacing locational bases for school place allocation with a lottery - most children are in urban areas but, even here, school allocation makes a huge difference. We know that when children from lower social class (as measured by parental education level) are educated alongside their middle class neighbours they achieve better. Our locational system of allocation results in social sortition and less social mobility

Making divorce more difficult and promoting a culture where the order is "get married, have children" not "have kids and maybe sometime later get married, perhaps if he's still around" - yes folks, the children of single parents and children born outside marriage do less well at school. This is the case even when we control for other variables (and, yes, not every child of a single parent fails, just on average such children are more likely to perform less well)

Tax incentives or subsidy for single income households - the effect of a household where one parent doesn't work is also positive. Just as we should encourage marriage, we should encourage stay at home mums or dads - pay them the money we're already allocating to childcare maybe?

Not sending so many young men to prison - Putman reports again and again that the struggling young people he interviews have a father in prison. Again the evidence tells us this forced form of family breakdown results in poorer achievement, lower income, increased child delinquency. It's also a disaster for the young men we lock up - instead of 90,000 in prison we should aim to (at least) half that number

You see the problem? Put forward a manifesto saying scrap the green belt, end parental choice in school places, make divorce harder, subsidise stay-at-home mums and stop locking up so many young men. Go on. It'll be fun. Except for your candidates. It's much simpler to say "my government will pay x to y" or "we'll make it easier to dump you hubby because he snores" or even "we'll tax an unspecified bunch of rich people and companies so we can give you a tasty little cash bribe". This doesn't solve the problem but is more likely to get you elected.

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The Conservative Party's problem...

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...capured here:

Most of all, broadly speaking, I think you’d struggle to find many people under the age of 40 who are appalled or outraged or betrayed by this, far less many who really feel insulted or punished. This may reflect my own selection biases of course but, really, I look at today’s Tory papers and wonder where and when these people are living and to whom they think the modern Tory party should be trying to appeal. Because, on the evidence of today’s papers, it sure ain’t middle-class (and metropolitan!) women.

It's not David Cameron's problem or even the parliamentary party's problem, it's a problem of our image, focus and preference. The Party's image and outlook - again this isn't a consequence of policy, ideology or strategy but one of positioning - is designed to sustain it's core. And that core, the 'Conservative Base' if you wish, is over 55, living in the South East and wealthy pockets elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of these people. They form the core constituency and customer base for the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, they don't approve of newfanged things like gay marriage and women going out to work, and they make up nearly all of the Conservative Party's 150,000 members (as an aside, when I joined the party in 1976 it had around 2 million members).

The Party has lost the support of two generations of educated young people - the bunch who finished university and started work in the 1990s and the cohort who did likewise in the 2000s. This goes a long way to explaining why the Party got less than 40% of AB voters - its traditional core support - in the 2010 General Election.

Alex Massie is right. It would be a poor do if this was just the response to giving working mums a tax break on childcare. But it isn't - the same goes for almost any policy that might look even the slightest bit socially liberal. Whether it's gay rights or racial discrimination, the knee-jerk of the conservative press - echoed by the 'party faithful' next time they meet their MP - is to say no and gibber about political correctness or traditional values.

Until this changes, the Conservative Party will decline. For sure, vacuuming up the grumpy old man vote might work as a short term strategy but in the long term all it does it annoy the hell out of 30 and 40 something voters. Voters who really don't have a choice but for mum to work - and who will welcome a little tax break on childcare.

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Corporate Parenting - or how to dump poor kids on life's scrapheap

Yesterday, while idling away some of my precious time on twitter, I chanced upon the comments emanating from Kirklees – where the full council meeting was in process. And the assembled councillors were receiving a presentation on ‘corporate parenting’ – including no doubt an outline of the duties and responsibilities placed on local authorities in looking after children place in their care. The idea of corporate parenting is that we – the councillors collectively – take on the role and duties that go with parenting a child.

And what a success we are making of the job!

Figures recently published in the Prison Reform Trust's Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile report, show 71% of children in custody have either been involved with social services, or in care, before entering custody, while 75% of children in custody have lived with someone other than a parent at some time in their life.

And

Every child in care is capable of success in learning and in life, yet in 2008 just 14% of these children achieved 5 A* - C grade GCSEs, the level which is increasingly seen as the basic threshold for employability.

What a brilliant job we’re doing as parents.

And this is further compounded by anecdotal evidence that children in care are being given no obvious moral foundation to their life – in fact we struggle even to keep them home! Here’s part of the report from a recent sexual exploitation case in Derby:

A number of agencies were involved in helping the two girls, but did not work together to build a comprehensive picture of them. One girl was looked after by Derby city council from April 2009 and the other from October 2008. But as their behaviour spiralled out of control, staff did not realise there were signs of abuse and dealt with them as "rebellious adolescents".

I could go on with this – citing example after example of how the care system fails children – either by allowing them almost complete free rein or else by providing no input to helping the children do better at school.  During discussions with health workers recently, I was told that some care workers even refuse to give girls contraceptive advice - which might explain this:

Looked-after young people are at greater risk of teenage pregnancy and are 2.5 times more likely to become pregnant than other teenagers.

While I appreciate that the care system inevitably picks up the more abused and vulnerable children, I do wonder whether we need to re-examine the way in which we actually deliver the ‘care’. For there can be no doubt that, no matter how many presentations us councillors receive about corporate parenting, the real ‘parenting’ problem lies with those delivering the care. And – as councillors – we have very little say over the way that care is provided other than issues of funding, management and trouble-shooting.

Yet ‘corporate parenting’ tells us we are responsible. Perhaps we might start to insist on a little parenting rather than the value- and judgment-free approach that is failing these poor children at the moment? And perhaps we’ll stop talking about ‘corporate parenting’ as if it has any reality and begin to realise that the young people are being failed by the system we have at present.

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Thoughts on the Gospel According to St Frank

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So Frank Field, Poverty Tsar has pontificated. And I suppose that other wiser heads than me will look in detail at the words, consider their import and add the work to the huge collection of work on poverty, its alleviation and its causes that clutters our collective shelves.

Now Frank is two things - a serious and muscular christian and a social democrat. We need to bear these two factors in mind when considering the impact and importance of his words and his prescriptions for the treatment of poverty.

Some initial (informed) comment comes from Langtry Girl and Wat Tyler (one has to respect pseudonyms). Here's Langtry Girl expressing her concerns that Frank is getting away from the importance of money:

I think Frank Field is a good man. I also know, both from personal experience and from research that inter-generational poverty, is one of the toughest nuts to crack. However, given his remit, and given this Government's philosophy, this report misses the point - poverty is about money, and no amount of research can get us away from that.

Now, I worry that Langtry Girl let's her own specific experience get in the way of considering the aggregate but her observation that poverty does have something to do with money remains a sound observation. Which brings us to Wat:

Spot on Frank. We have long believed that dishing out yet more cash to poor families is missing the point. In general, even the lowest incomes today have moved far above what most of us mean by poverty.

So the problem isn't more money - and Wat is right in observing that the poorest British citizens today are better off than the average citizen was in 1960. By a substantial margin.

Sadly, neither Wat or Langtry Girl offer a strategic alternative to Frank's belief that it is the first five years of life that matter and that the state should concentrate it's efforts in some way on babies and toddlers. Frank's key conclusion that:

To drive this policy the Review proposes establishing the ‘Foundation Years’ covering the period from the womb to five. The Foundation Years should become the first pillar of a new tripartite education system: the Foundation Years leading to school years leading to further, higher and continuing education.

My worry here is that we are moving further towards baby farms - towards the East German model of childcare where babies are left in the care of the state from a very young age. I also worry about the teaching of "parenthood" - we will not get firm, strong parenting as a result of this but a mish-mash of 'non-judgmental', undirected psycho-babble laid on a plate before young people.

It seems to me that Frank Field is using the tragedy of poverty as an excuse to introduce a christian socialist, grandpa knows best approach to bringing up children where the state mandates the 'right approach' to parenting and applies sanctions and controls to any one - and especially working class anyones - who step outside this 'right approach'. I'm sure Frank means well. His diagnosis is sound - and very familiar. But prescribing more government seems to me as the wrong solution. The result of this will be more children taken into care, more unjustified 'childcare interventions' and a new industry of 'parenting' - nothing that seems to me as addressing the problem Frank Field was asked to address.

And please tell me that Frank Field didn't propose a "working-class Mumsnet"? That is the stupidest, most ignorant and most patronising thing I've heard in ages. Mumsnet - a truly awful institution in my view - exists because mums set it up and ran it. It succeeds because it has losts of mums using is. It isnt there because the Government mandated it should be there. If the world wanted a working-class mumsnet, there would be a working-class mumsnet.

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