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Labour has no “overarching narrative” to use different policies to create social mobility – help people improve their personal prosperity, according to the government’s advisor on such matters.
This may not be news to many of us; it is only a matter of weeks since the Labour government was criticised for failing to improve conditions in six out of nine public service categories, with a seventh having worsened.
The latest brickbat has flown from social mobility commissioner Alun Francis. Here’s the BBC: “A report by the commission released last week warned that “extreme regional disparities” existed in the UK, with many former industrial and mining areas worst affected.
“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.
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““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.”
“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”.
“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 really damaging point here is not just that Labour currently lacks a coherent social mobility strategy, but that this is something a party claiming to be a government-in-waiting should have had fully worked out long before the general election of 2024.
Social mobility is not a niche policy area. For Labour, historically, it is meant to be the core justification for its existence: improving life chances for people born without privilege.
If Keir Starmer arrived in government without an overarching framework for that, it strongly suggests one of two things – either the leadership does not see social mobility as central any more, or it assumes that market-led growth will somehow deliver it automatically.
Neither reflects well on Starmer’s project.
Alun Francis’s criticism cuts deeper than a complaint about coordination. When he says there is no “overarching narrative”, he is pointing to the absence of a governing philosophy.
What exists instead is a collection of technocratic interventions – skills here, housing there – without a clear answer to the basic political question: what kind of society is Labour trying to create, and how do power, wealth and opportunity move within it?
That matters because social mobility cannot be delivered by isolated policies – it depends on how education, housing, transport, regional investment, labour markets and welfare interact over time.
Without a unifying strategy, “stop-start” policy is not an accident; it is the inevitable result of governing by managerial instinct rather than political purpose.
There is also an ideological problem lurking beneath this: Francis notes that ministers talk about social mobility mainly in personal terms – their own stories, their own trajectories.
That reflects Starmerism’s broader tendency to individualise structural problems; mobility becomes a matter of personal effort and aspiration rather than collective conditions.
In that framing, the state’s role shrinks to smoothing the edges, not reshaping the system.
The regional disparities highlighted in the report expose this weakness brutally: it is impossible to talk seriously about social mobility while accepting an economy where former mining and industrial areas remain structurally locked out of opportunity.
That requires deliberate, long-term redistribution of investment and power away from already-successful regions – something this Labour leadership has consistently been reluctant to support, for fear of spooking business or the right-wing press.
The fact that the government’s response is to point to yet another review – this time by Alan Milburn – reinforces the impression of drift.
Reviews are commissioned when governments lack either clarity or courage. They are not substitutes for a strategy that should already exist.
This is very much part of that wider criticism of Starmer having no plan – but more specifically, it shows that Labour entered office without a settled answer to one of the most fundamental questions it should exist to address.
That is not a teething problem of government; it is a failure of political preparation.
For a party that spent years insisting it was ready to govern, that failure is hard to excuse.
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No plan for social mobility under Labour, government advisor claims
Share this post:
Labour has no “overarching narrative” to use different policies to create social mobility – help people improve their personal prosperity, according to the government’s advisor on such matters.
This may not be news to many of us; it is only a matter of weeks since the Labour government was criticised for failing to improve conditions in six out of nine public service categories, with a seventh having worsened.
The latest brickbat has flown from social mobility commissioner Alun Francis. Here’s the BBC: “A report by the commission released last week warned that “extreme regional disparities” existed in the UK, with many former industrial and mining areas worst affected.
“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.
““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.”
“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”.
“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 really damaging point here is not just that Labour currently lacks a coherent social mobility strategy, but that this is something a party claiming to be a government-in-waiting should have had fully worked out long before the general election of 2024.
Social mobility is not a niche policy area. For Labour, historically, it is meant to be the core justification for its existence: improving life chances for people born without privilege.
If Keir Starmer arrived in government without an overarching framework for that, it strongly suggests one of two things – either the leadership does not see social mobility as central any more, or it assumes that market-led growth will somehow deliver it automatically.
Neither reflects well on Starmer’s project.
Alun Francis’s criticism cuts deeper than a complaint about coordination. When he says there is no “overarching narrative”, he is pointing to the absence of a governing philosophy.
What exists instead is a collection of technocratic interventions – skills here, housing there – without a clear answer to the basic political question: what kind of society is Labour trying to create, and how do power, wealth and opportunity move within it?
That matters because social mobility cannot be delivered by isolated policies – it depends on how education, housing, transport, regional investment, labour markets and welfare interact over time.
Without a unifying strategy, “stop-start” policy is not an accident; it is the inevitable result of governing by managerial instinct rather than political purpose.
There is also an ideological problem lurking beneath this: Francis notes that ministers talk about social mobility mainly in personal terms – their own stories, their own trajectories.
That reflects Starmerism’s broader tendency to individualise structural problems; mobility becomes a matter of personal effort and aspiration rather than collective conditions.
In that framing, the state’s role shrinks to smoothing the edges, not reshaping the system.
The regional disparities highlighted in the report expose this weakness brutally: it is impossible to talk seriously about social mobility while accepting an economy where former mining and industrial areas remain structurally locked out of opportunity.
That requires deliberate, long-term redistribution of investment and power away from already-successful regions – something this Labour leadership has consistently been reluctant to support, for fear of spooking business or the right-wing press.
The fact that the government’s response is to point to yet another review – this time by Alan Milburn – reinforces the impression of drift.
Reviews are commissioned when governments lack either clarity or courage. They are not substitutes for a strategy that should already exist.
This is very much part of that wider criticism of Starmer having no plan – but more specifically, it shows that Labour entered office without a settled answer to one of the most fundamental questions it should exist to address.
That is not a teething problem of government; it is a failure of political preparation.
For a party that spent years insisting it was ready to govern, that failure is hard to excuse.
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