Examination of witnesses
Professor Anna Mountford-Zimdars, Professor Stephen Machin and Dr Louise Ashley.
Q24 The Chair: Good morning and welcome.
Professor Stephen Machin: I am a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, and I direct the centre for economic performance which is based there.
Professor Anna Mountford-Zimdars: I am a professor at the University of Exeter. I was appointed as a professor of widening participation to start up a new research centre. A year into post, in the light of the political landscape, I renamed it the Centre for Social Mobility. When the political landscape changed last year, I changed my job title to professor of social justice. Terminology is really important in that space and it is coloured by the politics of the moment. My centre is jointly directed with a practitioner and we are situated as a theory and practice centre.
I am also here as a representative of the south-west and to talk about regional issues specifically in the south-west and the rural coastal area that it represents.
Dr Louise Ashley: I am an academic based at Queen Mary University of London where I predominantly research access to the labour market: how social class or socioeconomic background affects access to, and career progression within, the labour market. I look particularly at so-called elite occupations and perhaps we will get on to that. By definition, many of those jobs are based in London so we might talk about that regional aspect.
It is probably worth saying that I have been rather critical about the agenda in terms of widening access to the elite professions. I have been critical both of the way in which it is operationalised and in terms of the very heavy focus on that as the route towards changing rates of social mobility in the UK. Maybe we will pick up on some points made by the commission in terms of that very narrow focus on long-range social mobility over the past 10 to 15 years. I do not suggest that we should abandon that focus, but we should perhaps question whether it is the only way to define the issue; maybe we will get on to related tensions and paradoxes.
Q25 The Chair: It sounds as though you are going to have views on the first question, which is how do you define social mobility? Professor Mountford-Zimdars uses the term “social justice” and Dr Ashley is unsure about it, so here is your opportunity to influence us on how we should define it and why it matters.
Professor Stephen Machin: Social mobility is a widely used term in research and policy, and in general media discussions as well. From a research perspective, social mobility is a study of the connections between the economic and social outcomes of parents and children, defining how much mobility or movement there is within families over time and across generations.
If you look at social class or income as economic and social metrics, you might be interested in whether people stay in the same place as their parents or whether they move, and in what direction they move. One metric of social mobility would be whether they move up or down relative to their parents. I have mentioned social class and income; you might think about labour market earnings, you might think about home ownership, you might think about a whole array of economic and social outcomes that matter for people throughout their lives.
Most people, but I would stress not all, think that social mobility is a good thing. My Penguin book from 2018, which is co-authored with one of Anna’s colleagues at the University of Exeter, Lee Elliot Major, was entitled Social Mobility and its Enemies. That is quite an important thing to think about; not everybody thinks that social mobility is necessarily good. Many people do, but some do not.
That brings us to two critical definitions of social mobility. One, which I have already alluded to, is relative mobility: whether you move up or down the distribution relative to other people.
Lord Evans of Rainow: Is that compared to your parents?
Professor Stephen Machin: Compared to your parents, yes, but people can move up or down across the whole population. If you take somebody who is the child of the richest person in society, they can only go one way: they can stay the richest or move down. If you take the poorest, they can only go one way: they can go up or stay exactly the same. That is relative mobility.
The other concept that is used is about income and whether people are getting richer, as compared with their parents in their respective generation. That is called absolute mobility. If we think about absolute mobility, everybody can move up. One of the critical issues we have faced in the past 15 years or so in Britain—for even longer in the US—is that absolute mobility is falling over time, largely because real wages have stagnated in the labour market. That is really rather important. In terms of absolute mobility, living standards are not rising because real wages are not rising. If you think about young people entering the labour market now, they are entering with real wages on average at the same level as they were in 2008. That is extremely important.
If we want a very quick short definition, social mobility is about the transmission of inequality across generations. The more social mobility there is, the less inequality is transmitted across generations. When there is less persistence in your position in society compared to your parents, you get more movement up and down in relative terms and hopefully up in absolute terms, although we have not witnessed that in this country for the past 15 to 20 years.
We can ask, why does it matter? One very obvious reason why it matters is because social mobility is much lower in Britain than in many other countries. It is of a similar magnitude to the United States, where many people push the American Dream idea. The American Dream idea is not very realistic. The US has a large population, so some people do go from the bottom to the top, but not many.
By almost any metric that you might want to look at, the evidence is that Britain does rather poorly in terms of social mobility. It does much worse than countries such as Germany, France and Italy—and way worse than the Scandinavian countries which, if you just take a snapshot measure, have far more mobility by any metric.
I guess that we will come to questions a bit later about what has happened over time, so I will leave that for now. Although I will argue very strongly that social mobility has been declining both in relative terms and in absolute terms.
Lord Watts: You said that mobility, or income anyway, has stagnated in the UK and in the US, but there is a group where it has not stagnated; at the top, they have become richer while the poor have become poorer. Is dealing with that gap a crucial element of how we address social mobility? It is getting wider by the day.
Professor Stephen Machin: The extent of mobility and the level of inequality are strongly correlated. There is a famous chart named the “Great Gatsby Curve”, which plots the extent of social mobility in countries against the level of inequality. It slopes strongly upwards—or downwards, depending on how you think about it—and there is a very strong association between low social mobility and high inequality. In terms of changes over time, there are studies that look across US states and there is a bit of work looking across UK regions. You can see that, if inequality goes up, social mobility falls in relative terms. So yes, that is true.
I just clarify one thing, though: I was talking about real wages stagnating on average, but that is for the typical worker in the economy. Inequalities widen around that stagnating average. Some people have done very well and some have done very badly. In international terms, the level of inequality is quite high in the UK, though not quite as high as in the US. If we think about the connection, it makes sense that if you have a wider income distribution—if the gap between the highest paid and the lowest paid and the highest incomes and the lowest incomes of the wealthiest and the least wealthy is wider—then you have further to travel. If you rank everybody from the poorest to the richest and the distribution is wider, you have further to travel to go up a place in the distribution. You have to get more pounds or dollars or euros or whatever to move up a place.
The Chair: Can I go back to the original question and ask the other two how they would define social mobility?
Professor Anna Mountford-Zimdars: I would like to make one point on relative social mobility. When I did my own doctoral research, it was on admissions to the University of Oxford, and I clearly built a very good career out of that piece of work. One of the key things I found was that, in the population at the time—we are talking 2002—33% were from the professional managerial class, but 72% of the admitted pool at Oxford were from that group. I then mapped the relative chances compared with having applied and fine-grained it by looking at social and cultural capitals. It was all very exciting—I wrote over 100,000 words about it—but what I should really have written about is the fact that 23% of the British population are in skilled and unskilled occupations and 0% of those had applied to Oxford in that year, which means 0% were admitted.
When we talk about relative social mobility, we can get really bamboozled into thinking that there is a story and that we need to equalise chances, but we might just be treating a patient for a minor injury when their heart is stopping. This is about inequality and it is about poverty as well. The Child Poverty Commission was founded in 2010. In 2012 it was renamed the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission but, since 2016, we have talked about only social mobility; we have dropped child poverty. Why? Really high levels of child poverty can coexist with social mobility—we have just said that there is a correlation.
I cite a former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who said: "If we are going to have wealth gaps on this scale then there must be social mobility”. This quotation appeals to the right and the left, to people of different political persuasions. It is saying, “Let us be honest: if we live in a society with really high inequality, where we risk social unrest because some people are so poor they might want to take to the streets and demand more rights, we need a really strong discourse of people thinking that they are able to pull themselves up, and that discourse is social mobility”. That is why I have become so critical of that discourse.
In the first meeting that you had with Alun Francis, he said that there was a plethora of activity around social mobility for a relatively advantaged group and rescuing disadvantaged, talented young people from destitution by making them deserving of social mobility.
The Chair: Can I just remind you that we do not have a whole day and we have quite a lot of questions we want to get through? I do not want to inhibit discussion because this is all very important, but it would be helpful if we could have reasonably crisp answers, otherwise we will overrun.
You have explained very clearly why you have renamed your centre the Centre for Social Justice, so thank you very much.
Dr Louise Ashley: I will try to be crisp because I am not going to say an awful lot that is different from or more than the others have said, especially on definitions. I will just reiterate that question of, “Does it matter?” the answer is, yes, social mobility matters. Hopefully nobody would say that we do not want to see people able to fulfil their potential or their aspirations, whatever those might be. Does it matter more than other challenges? That is questionable, as Anna has just said. Does it matter, for example, more than child poverty? Does it matter more than wealth inequalities? Potentially, the decision to focus on social mobility, which has been dominant in related policy agendas over the past 10, 15 or 20 years, is a political decision.
I am really encouraged that this committee is considering the evidence around this. It is absolutely brilliant, but I do not think we can pretend that the politics of the matter—I mean lowercase politics, not necessarily party politics—is not critical.
If we decide that social mobility is the thing that we want to focus on, one question that we might then ask is, “Why do we start there?” As has already been said, we know that more socially mobile countries tend to have lower rates of inequality. They start with class abatement or equality of condition. Pulling specific levers in education or the labour market can have a positive effect for individuals, but it is likely to have a very minimal effect on rates of social mobility overall. That is why, in the UK, we have what has been called a social mobility industry. We have many initiatives and many organisations working on this—many are doing brilliant work—but they have hardly made a dent in the overall rates of social mobility yet. It is almost an elephant in the room, and we need to address that elephant head-on.
To add one last thing—I am not being as crisp as I promised—when we say that relative social mobility matters, we must also ask who it matters for, and who benefits the most. I look at access to elite occupations; it of course benefits people who are coming into those organisations who might not otherwise do so, but, as Anna said, many of these issues around relative social mobility have a strong legitimation effect. They legitimate the status quo; it is a fundamental paradox that what looks like change is something that underlines the status quo. My view is that unless we face this issue head-on—it can be really difficult to do that because these conversations are hard and sensitive—we will be talking about the same thing, over and again, in 10 years.
Q26 Baroness Blower: Cards on the table: I much prefer notions of social justice to the current thinking about social mobility, but I will ask the question we have here. To Professor Machin first—I think you have largely answered it anyway—how can social mobility be measured? I am also interested, however, in what the current data tells us about social mobility in the UK and what problems there are with that data. There are other researchers who have looked at different types of data; can you tell us what your take is on all that?
Professor Stephen Machin: That is a very important observation about the data. What we are trying to measure is the sum of correlations or relationships between a given economic and social outcome. That measurement might be of income, earnings, education or wealth, or it might be of whether you own your own house. It might concern a whole array of things that are important to people throughout their lives and that are transmitted across generations. To say how these things are related sounds like an easy and straightforward thing to do but it is not, because there are many issues to do with data and many conceptual issues about what you are trying to do.
What we really would like is to have some metric—it does not really matter which one it is—that could be measured over the whole lifetime of children and the whole lifetime of their parents. We would then like to study the empirical relationship and how strong or weak that is in terms of estimating the extent of transmission across generations. That is pretty hard.
Let us take people’s annual earnings in the labour market, for instance. We do not have any data source that measures every year through a person’s lifetime or that matches children to their parents, so we have to try to approximate that in research, and that is what we do. There are shortcomings with some data and there are measurement error issues that can bias the estimation of relationships. Conceptually, it is not the easiest thing in the world to do, which is why many people have spent a lot of time, using a whole array of different sorts of data, researching and investigating these questions.
I was going to talk about data when we get to the end, because there are better things we could do. There are better data sources in other countries that get a bit closer to that ideal experiment—if we think it is an experiment that we want to undertake. The Scandinavian register data has loads of stuff about people matched to their parents; quite a lot of studies about social mobility have used that data and have done a better job than much of what we can do in Britain. We know what the differences are, and there are data sources that could be accessed in Britain to look at these things. I can talk about that afterwards if you want, but it is a really important issue.
In terms of what we know from the data on social mobility in the UK—I mentioned some before—we are low in international terms, and mobility has fallen over time. There is a debate between different social science disciplines, principally pitched as economists against sociologists. Sociologists tend to look at social class, which is usually your occupation as compared to your father’s occupation. There are around eight or 10 broad measures of social class, from professional, technical, skilled manual—in the old days—to semi-skilled manual and unskilled manual. These are very coarse measures compared to income. However, if you look at income and earnings, it is clear that social mobility has fallen over time. The persistence between what people earn in the labour market and what their parents earned has become stronger.
With social class, the broad social class stuff shows less of a change, but some sociologists have worked on wider social class measures and narrower occupations—they have looked at 300 or so occupations rather than 10. By doing that, you get the same results as with income and earnings. There is an easy reconciliation of those results because inequality has gone up within those broad social classes. Within the professional group, for instance, inequality has gone up, partly because of different occupations within the grouping; lawyers have done better than academics, for example.
The Chair: I am sorry to stop you, but I really need to press the panel to give us some crisp answers; we have approximately 20 more minutes and there are quite a lot of things to cover. Can I ask the other two panellists: do you have things to add to what Professor Machin has said, or do you differ from him?
Professor Anna Mountford-Zimdars: This is not a direct response to this question, but there was a point from Lord Evans of Rainow about evaluation and data. I do not want to answer it in detail, but there is a discussion to be had around that as well as about what data we use for evaluations and what we evaluate.
Can I make one concrete point? It sounds a bit abstract, but you mentioned that we need to evaluate whether we get value for money. I come from the south-west. If, for example, you put a new bus service on in the south-west, you will have a much lower footfall than if you put a new bus service on in London. So in a KPI-type evaluation it looks like the value is better in London even though it might be transformative in getting a child in the south-west to school who would not otherwise get there. It is difficult to capture that if you are just capturing footfall on a bus or something. Valuations are complex.
Q27 Lord Ravensdale: We touched on geography and place-based approaches quite a bit in the previous panel, and it is one of the critical areas that the committee wants to explore. Could you describe the significance of geography and place-based approaches in improving access to educational and job opportunities and, therefore, social mobility? I would also be interested to hear some practical examples of what a place-based approach could look like.
Professor Anna Mountford-Zimdars: I was going to talk about the labour market, transport and education. Transport sounds like a mundane point, but it is really, really crucial. In the south-west, we have the Isles of Scilly, which does not have post-16 provision, and we have Cornwall, which has one college offering A-levels. Transport is key in terms of accessing opportunities or not accessing them. There is no post-16 statutory obligation to provide transport free of charge, so some children are simply not going to school because they cannot raise the funds for their transport to school. We also have a high percentage of home-educated children; in Devon almost 4,000 children are in home education, which is about the size of three secondary schools. There is little exam support for them. There is no exam centre in Cornwall; in Devon, there is an exam centre but you have to go up to Bristol. So transport is key.
Coming back to the point about money, that is also key. If you are home-educated in the south-west, you will pay £1,750 in fees to access five GCSEs; that is just the fees, not the transport and overnight accommodation you are likely to have to pay if you are home-educated in that part of the world. Home education—and that is a later question—is obviously interlinked with SEND provision in school, off-rolling and mental health issues and lots of other things, as well as being a lifestyle choice for some.
Transport is key. Education is key. Opportunities are key.
Like those on the previous panel, we really benefit from strong examples of local collaboration, largely based on the goodwill of local partners like the county council, the FE colleges, university employers and civic partners. We think we would benefit from that collaboration not being just a goodwill alliance. More statutory duties for other bodies than universities to have social mobility as part of their duties would enable our collaborations and enable us to speak the same language.
We would really like you all to come down to the south-west and experience a little of our challenges, to see the barriers and opportunities for growth and collaboration. There are exciting things happening in the labour market as well, but there can be a mismatch between the qualifications people have and labour market opportunities, plus getting people to those opportunities.
The Chair: Thank you. We have so much to take in and so much work to do that, although it is very tempting to come for a visit to Exeter—there are also lots of other places we would like to go—we may not make it but thank you very much.
Q28 Lord Hampton: I will start with Dr Ashley because you were talking about the elephant in the room: pulling specific levers in education is ineffective. We know about the lucky few, and that the Sutton Trust talking about social mobility is basically getting people into Russell group universities. We have heard from Professor Machin that we need to start earlier. So, how do you get education to help reduce barriers to social mobility?
Dr Louise Ashley: Anna might be better equipped to answer the educational question, but I would not say that education is ineffective in terms of driving social mobility. It is a considerable driver of upward social mobility for individuals, so education really matters in that individualistic sense, but—you talked about this with the commission—it goes back to that difference between, on the one hand, relative social mobility and facilitating a long-range, socially upward mobility journey, as compared to a focus on the systemic natures which relate to absolute social mobility. Education is part of the picture but we have to think about how we understand social mobility holistically and, critically, systemically.
Just to make a quick point building from the place-based thing; if we look at the structure of our economy in the UK, we have a highly financialised economy—we are all aware of that—which means that we are very focused on London in terms of job creation, productivity and all those things. Now, that structure is absolutely central to the way in which social mobility works within our system. If you pull an educational lever, yes, that will have some benefits for some people in certain circumstances, but it is just a tiny part of the picture.
One way that we can think about social mobility is that it is what is known as a wicked problem. Are people familiar with that term?
Lord Hampton: What problem?
Dr Louise Ashley: A wicked problem. When we think about change management we think about critical problems, tame problems, or so-called wicked problems. Critical problems are ones that are urgent; tame problems are operational: they may be complex but we can think of a process or a solution to address them. Social mobility is a wicked problem in the sense that it is unbelievably complex, not everybody agrees what the problem is or whether the problem even exists, we do not necessarily know how to solve it or how we will know when we have solved it. We also know that if we pull one lever, often something else happens somewhere else that has the opposite effect. That is sort of the law of unintended consequences.
I do not know if I am quite answering your question, but we should absolutely look at education as a driver of social mobility. However, we must understand that social mobility is a wicked problem and put together a theory of change which takes that into account and which is systemic. If you change certain levers but leave the underlying class structure completely intact, we will be—as I said—in the same position 10 to 15 years from now and we will be wondering why.
Q29 Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath: How can we improve social mobility for those young people who have not been in education, training or employment?
Professor Anna Mountford-Zimdars: I will go first on that. Prevention is obviously better than cure, so you should try to keep those young people in the education system. A lot of that depends on SEND provision and there are separate inquiries going on into that but also, if there are exclusions for behaviour, those could maybe be managed more within schools. Once young people have exited the system they can quite quickly be a long distance from the labour market. Again, measurement here is crucial. If we just measure success in engaging with NEET young people as getting them a job, that can be quite far away for a person who has not left their bedroom for three years and needs the sustained intervention of a social worker coming to see them once a week for three months before they open their bedroom door.
Part of addressing the NEET problem is making support for NEETs structural and embedded. That is a concern in the south-west, where we have heavily relied on European funding for 20 years. The EU has poured over £1 billion into the economy and created jobs, and there has been 68% growth in the area, which is 25% higher than it would have been without that funding. The follow-up funding—the shared prosperity funding—is coming to an end next year, so I have been part of evaluating one of the NEET projects that was run with that funding.
Evaluation has been raised by several people before. It is really hard to do an intervention if you have a two-year timeline: you need to bid for money, then you have 18 months to run the project and you are losing key staff from eight months into the project. So you are trying to run an intervention targeted at NEET young people on short-term funding when you are tackling a long-term problem, and you constantly have new people coming in who might be falling off the cliff. Someone may need a one-year intervention, but your funding stream is not for that amount of time. I am going on, but the point is that we need embedded sustainable funding for those things.
Professor Stephen Machin: I would add a little more, which also speaks to the previous question. On the NEETs issue, the big problem for quite a long time in this country is that we have had a strong core—it depends on how you measure it—of something like 15% to 20% of 16 to 19 year-olds who are not in education employment or training. It is a structural thing but it has been there for a long time. This relates to a previous question because many people think that education is the great leveller and that it therefore contributes very well to promoting social mobility. It turns out that it has not done that at all over time in the way it has been organised in this country; it has actually just reinforced existing inequalities, and that is because of a big focus on higher university education that we are very good at. We are very good at university education, but there is a cost to producing high-quality graduates. The flip side is that we are not very good at all on the non-graduate population after they have left school. Our vocational education system has been woeful over the last 20 or 30 years, maybe longer. That is one of the reasons why we have these big gaps between graduates and non-graduates in the labour market: non-graduate education is not delivering good returns.
Take the case of some NEETs. If somebody leaves school at age 16—the leaving age has gone up, but for most of that time period there was a school leaving age of 16—they may, with all the best intentions, do a course in an FE college. They might get an NVQ level 1, maybe a level 2, but then when they get a job there is no wage gain from having that qualification. They are actually earning less than people who entered the labour market at 16 and who have had a couple of years’ experience. That is because the education system is not delivering a good qualification, one which is rewarded in the labour market for the investment they have made, to those people. This has been around for a long, long time, and it has been getting worse and worse. The austerity cuts to further education colleges have made it massively worse. It is not rocket science. The non-graduate population in this country is not being given the same education and that is one reason why we have such high levels of inequality in the labour market.
The Chair: We have Lord Johnson and then I have a final question. Again, I am sorry to ask you to constrain what you want to say to us but we are running out of time.
Q30 Lord Johnson of Marylebone: My question is specifically for Dr Ashley. Could you please outline any employer initiatives which you think have been particularly effective in promoting social mobility?
Dr Louise Ashley: Yes, and I will try to be as speedy as I can.
The Chair: If you feel inhibited from saying all that you want to say, you can always send it to us later as evidence. If you could just give us the headlines, that would be appreciated.
Dr Louise Ashley: Absolutely. There has been a lot of activity on employer initiatives that focus on social mobility in the so-called elite professions such as law, accountancy, banking and those kinds of occupations—not exclusively, but that is where a lot of attention has been focused, partly because they have historically been seen as routes towards upward social mobility and they have had a lot more scrutiny.
The headline point about that is that those organisations and occupations have been slightly effective at opening access so that more people from less-advantaged backgrounds are able to get in. However, they have been much less effective at ensuring equivalent rates of career progression in terms of who gets on within those organisations. It is quite difficult to pick out a particular shiny example of an organisation or occupation that has been incredibly successful in that area; we are seeing incremental improvements, but still there is a very long way to go, I would say.
Lord Johnson of Marylebone: If there is anything you want to put in more detail, please write in to us.
Q31 The Chair: A silence has arisen—goodness me. I fear that, in trying to keep control of the timing, I may have prevented you all from saying some further things which you think the committee should tune into and take attention of, so could I encourage you to send those to us? Equally, if something occurs to you from our questioning that you had not thought of in advance but you think could help us we would really appreciate that too.
My final question is: do you have a particular recommendation that you would like to see the committee make in this area? Again, if you think of others subsequently, send them to us.
Professor Stephen Machin: I will give you three really quick bullet points. One is the non-graduate population point I just made a moment ago, which also dovetails quite well with employers. There are things like the apprenticeship levy, which did not work very well and has been recast as a new skills levy. That could be a very good opportunity for promoting employment among young people through apprenticeships, something we do not do as well as other countries that have much more equal distributions of economic output.
The second one is about employers, and it speaks to the NEETs question as well. It is about getting employment up among that group: not with dead-end, low-quality jobs with real wage stagnation and low-quality work being produced like we have been doing over the last 15 years, but with decent work of some sort that people actually want to do and get rewarded for properly. That seems very important.
The third one, which has already been raised by Baroness Blower, is a research request about data. On this side of the table, we could probably do an even better job giving advice about social mobility if we had access to the better data that possibly exists. There was a very important US study by Raj Chetty and his colleagues in Harvard and Stanford. They got access to the IRS data on everybody’s earnings and income, and they are allowed to match up the parents to the children.
The Chair: If we were to recommend that, there might be kickback.
Professor Stephen Machin: The HMRC data is just the same.
The Chair: We have had some evidence on that, thank you, Professor.
Professor Anna Mountford-Zimdars: I will stick with my three points as well. The first one is following on your point, Steve, on the levy. In the south-west we have a lot of small and medium-sized enterprises. They are not well positioned to make use of the apprenticeship system because it can come with quite a lot of overheads which are more suited to larger employers. It would be helpful if there was a way to make it easier for them to use the levy to access apprenticeships.
The Chair: That is one of your recommendations. What are your other recommendations?
Professor Anna Mountford-Zimdars: There should be greater exam access, especially for home-educated students. I do not know whether you have a lever to pull on the cost, but for that population there are barriers to sitting examinations which seem unduly burdensome. I can send in details of what that might look like.
The third one is that local partnership which I mentioned before, which would really help us in the south-west going forward. If there was more of a duty to other public bodies, other than universities, to focus on social mobility then that would enable us all to work better collaboratively.
Dr Louise Ashley: I am preaching to the converted here but I would remind the committee to keep challenging assumptions, go back to basics, challenge your taken-for-granted assumptions around why you are focusing on social mobility and what it means: who is it a problem for, what is the problem, and where can it be addressed? That really involves looking at the underlying structures of our labour market, our class structure, et cetera, including thinking not just who gets what jobs, for example, but how jobs are valued differently. Those big questions are really important to come out with something new and something different that we have not done before.
The Chair: Thank you very much. I am sorry we were rushed. We are trying to do too much, I think, but we are grateful for your help. As I say, if there are things we have not covered, please feel free to send them in.