<\/p>\n
Keir Starmer has no \u201ccoherent\u201d strategy to tackle entrenched inequalities harming the life chances of millions of people, the government\u2019s social mobility commissioner has said.<\/p>\n
A major official report warned last week that young adults in Britain\u2019s former industrial heartlands were being left behind<\/a> as a result of failed or abandoned promises by successive governments.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cover-concentrated\u201d.<\/p>\n In a Guardian interview, the commission\u2019s chair, Alun Francis, urged Starmer to outline a bold vision to tackle \u201cthe defining social mobility challenge of our generation\u201d.<\/p>\n He said: \u201cWe have a government that talks quite a lot about social mobility, but mainly about individuals \u2013 often about [the] social mobility of themselves or their colleagues \u2026 But what we don\u2019t have is a coherent approach to social mobility as a useful concept that you can build a strategy around.\u201d<\/p>\n Francis\u2019s warning comes at a moment of mounting pressure on the government over its approach to social mobility after last week\u2019s SMC report<\/a> 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<\/a> now outside education, work or training, critics say the government has failed to articulate a plan to brighten their prospects before the next election.<\/p>\n Francis praised government policies on devolution and housing, but said welfare reform and other proposals had been \u201cstop-start\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve got other policies like growth, educational improvement where we\u2019re just not sure where we\u2019re going,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Francis said Labour\u2019s skills policy and its industrial strategy were a step forward but that there was \u201cno overarching narrative\u201d to pull all these strands together.<\/p>\n Without an overall strategy, he said, the government would \u201cstruggle to address some of those issues and have a clear-headed view about what we might do to improve things\u201d.<\/p>\n He also warned that without a \u201cuniversal view\u201d of what social mobility means, it risked being subsumed by diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies \u2013 an agenda that Nigel Farage\u2019s Reform UK has characterised as \u201cwoke\u201d and promised to dismantle.<\/p>\n \u201cTo some degree it\u2019s dropped into being a kind of part of DEI because it does have some of those aspects,\u201d he said. \u201cBut [social mobility] isn\u2019t really a DEI policy. It\u2019s more about an economic and social policy that\u2019s about bringing the benefits to everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n