Kate Bell, Andy Case, Jon Richards and Andy Murray.

Q105 The Chair: Good morning. We are very grateful to you for coming to this session of the Social Mobility Select Committee and our inquiry into this subject. Thank you for your time. I would like to kick off the questioning and it does not matter which of you speaks first. During our inquiry so far, we have found a number of definitions of social mobility, with which you may not agree. We would like to hear from you what you think is the most helpful definition. What things does it need to cover and consider? In particular, is there a difference between social justice and social mobility, and, if so, why?

Kate Bell: Thanks very much for having us all. I am the assistant general secretary of the TUC. Very simply, definitions of social mobility are around the ability to change your social position, and definitions of social justice are around ensuring that, whatever your social position, you have a decent standard of living and are treated with respect.

They are clearly linked. As trade unions, we see ourselves as having a key role to play in achieving both those objectives by, critically, ensuring that, in the workplace, people are treated fairly and with respect and have fair opportunities, whether it is in recruitment or in systems of progression and grading, and that people have a wider voice in society in advocating for policies and processes in their workplace that mean that everybody has a decent opportunity, in education, beyond education and in the workplace.

The Chair: Thank you very much. Do any of your colleagues wish to add to that? Please feel free to do so.

Jon Richards: That nicely sums up where we are. Employment is a key factor and role. Gordon Brown came out last night and said that child poverty used to be about unemployment but is now about low pay. We have a key role in ensuring that pay helps people out of child poverty and allows them to get into decent work and move through the social scales.

Andy Case: I am not sure that I could describe it better than my colleague, but, to put a slight education slant on it, it would be important to consider within social mobility whether everyone has access to all the opportunities, skills, knowledge and learning that they would need to help them thrive in their futures.

The Chair: That is a helpful start. Let us move on. Lady Blower is going to bail out in the middle, which has nothing to do with the quality of your evidence. She has a question in the House, so she is going first.

Q106 Baroness Blower: Thank you very much for being here. You have started to answer this question in response to the first one. Could you outline what you consider to be the role of your trade union—or, in the case of the TUC, all trade unions—in relation to social mobility? What does that look like in terms of the work of trade unions?

Jon Richards: You could package up what we do in in a number of ways, but I look at our work in four areas. I have already mentioned that we negotiate pay and conditions, which improves the ability of people to earn, to move through social grades, and to get better job and careers advice and guidance.

We support learning. We have a large UNISON college. Last year, we supported 4,000 learners through things such as return to learn programmes. A good example of that is the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, who recounts the story of his mother having two NUPE qualifications on her wall, which she would not have got without her union. We do significant amounts of work in educating people who have not done well in the education system. We supported 1,800 people doing specific e-work on CPD, directly and linking things in. We work on particular issues around teaching assistants and behaviour in classrooms. We will have specific work dealing with challenging behaviour and difficult conversations for social workers, as well as specific qualification work, which we provide there. That is the second area.

We campaign around cuts to funding and support for public services, which backs up social mobility and ensures that people have access to services. That is our third area.

Fourth, we are the leading union working on providing careers guidance. For instance, one of my careers guidance colleagues came and spoke to the Work and Pensions Select Committee a couple of weeks ago, talking about the work of careers guidance, how important it is, as the Government move to merge general and national careers guidance with jobcentres, and how careers guidance will work in that context. At my union, that is what we do.

Baroness Blower: For anyone who did not know, NUPE, or the National Union of Public Employees, was a precursor union and contributor to the existing UNISON union.

Jon Richards: Thank you for making that clear.

Andy Murray: I am a national officer for Unite. I cover two of our 19 sectors. One is education. In terms of our membership in the education sector, our members primarily work in higher and further education. I am also the national officer for the community youth worker not-for-profit sector, which is an incredibly diverse sector, but youth workers would be a relevant area that I could talk about.

In addition to what Jon says in terms of pay and conditions, the key issue that we look at is trying to protect employment in core sectors that are key to social mobility. I am going to emphasise education as the key area. I was a teacher and lecturer for 17 years before I came into full-time trade union work. I have had experience of the school sector, further education and higher education.

There are lots of initiatives going on, but I wonder at times whether there is enough joined-up thinking about what our education sector is trying to do or achieve. It is absolutely key in terms of social mobility. As an ex-teacher, I would say that, as well as imparting information, the key aspect of education is giving the individual student self-confidence, resilience and the ability to move into different types of work.

It is absolutely key that we have an adaptable workforce that can deal with technological change. I do not believe in the idea that you train people up to do a particular job and leave it like that, because there will be a change in technology. Artificial intelligence will come along and suddenly change the work landscape.

These people care about public services. Education is absolutely key to it. We face a number of crises at the moment in education. Higher education is facing a major financial problem. The Office for National Statistics predicts that 42% of higher education institutions are going to go into deficit next year. How does that relate to social mobility? None of those higher education institutions is closing at the moment, but they are cutting courses and staff. Reducing choice for students is going to impact heavily on the ability of people to move through social grades.

There has always been a problem around defining what further education is for. What is its role? Inevitably, it falls between the schools sector and higher education in terms of priority. It is very important in terms of the skills and economic growth agenda, but it is always subject to major financial problems and an inability to recruit appropriate staff to do the work. Once again, that impacts on social mobility.

I will let my colleagues talk about the school sector, because they know more about that than I do, but that is my initial contribution.

Andy Case: It sounds like a relevant time for me to come in. I am happy to talk about that. We are probably going to come on to it a bit later, but I would echo what my colleague just said. It would be helpful, as a society and as a Government, if we had an explanation of what we would want education to achieve—social mobility would be a key part of that—and how we are going to achieve that. I would agree that there is potentially a disjoint between those two things at the moment. What would you want out of an education system, and what policies and practices do we have in place that prevent that? I can go into that now, although we are potentially going to come to it a bit later.

To the original question about the role of our trade union in relation to social mobility, if you want a strong, well-motivated and effective workforce, and for people to stay in the profession, that is what the NEU proudly stands up for. We are protecting those terms and conditions for our members in the way that Jon mentioned. Democracy within the union dictates that our members care about their students and their futures, and so, similarly, we campaign and provide evidence. People such as me come and talk about things other than qualifications and the motivation of the workforce, such as students, child poverty or the curriculum.

Teachers are heavily invested in that. They are paying for us to come and try to advocate for those things, so we see that as our role. If we can advocate for the most fit-for-purpose education system possible, that is going to help social mobility.

Kate Bell: Just to make one macro point, so that it is on the record, we know that social mobility is quite strongly correlated with levels of equality in a society. We also know that stronger levels of collective bargaining and trade union representation are very heavily correlated with reducing inequality in society. We know that from evidence from the IMF and the OECD, both of which have recommended that stronger levels of collective bargaining are a critical tool to reducing levels of wage inequality and, therefore, increasing social mobility in a society.

Q107 Lord Watts: Can I just ask about your connection with the Open University? Many years ago, when I was active as a trade unionist, we encouraged people to do that. It is a way in for many kids who come from poor backgrounds.

Jon Richards: One of our general secretary’s manifesto pledges was to set up a UNISON college to boost the work around that sort of thing. We have partnerships with the Open University, the Workers’ Educational Association and various FE colleges to do the kind of professional work that I described, as well as some additional work.

We have introduced a free half-hour education guidance session with an organisation called the Learning Curve for people who, in a sense, know that they want to do some form of education but do not know what it is that they want. Do they want to become an activist? Do they want to just specialise in getting a new qualification? Do they want to do some specialist work? They can have a half-hour discussion with an education adviser that allows them to plan their career and what their education programme will look like. We are just putting in place some new systems that will allow each of our members to follow their career path journey. They will be able to look at their records online and see where they are. It will give them an option on how they move on.

We also do a piece of work called Skills for Schools, which is a careers-based website that we fund and keep. It was originally a joint venture with the Department for Education, but, with the cuts that happened we took it over. That allows careers pathways for teaching assistants and other school support staff to look at how things might be. The National Careers Service points people in our direction.

Kate Bell: It is probably worth saying that there are many such initiatives across trade unions. Their ability to support learning diminished under the last Government, when the union learning fund was cut. That was previously a government-funded programme that supported unions to get people who might not have had access to education back into learning, and helped fund union learning officers to do that. As Jon was saying, many unions have continued that work, but their ability has been diminished by that cut.

Q108 Baroness Hussein-Ece: Thank you very much, especially for the last question. The answers that you have given are very interesting. I wanted to ask about access to this, how widespread it is and awareness, particularly with lower-paid blue collar staff who would want to progress but may not have the opportunity, or even the knowledge, that these courses are available. I declare that I was chair of UNISON in Islington in the 1990s, so it is great to hear that your work is developing and going forward, especially in this field. I wanted to ask about the take-up of all these opportunities and courses.

Jon Richards: We have already increased take-up on those return to learning courses by 12% from last year to the first quarter of this year, so there is a real take-up. We are doing a lot more work in advertising those out to, particularly, as you said, blue collar workers. We will come on to it later, but we are looking to develop learning agreements with employers where we could do some joint work. I am sure we will talk later about our work in developing those. If we can have joint progress with employers, that encourages them to put workers through our processes and do some joint work. We are strongly pushing thsi out there.

With our new membership system, which will allow people to see their own journey on their own individual records, we are pretty confident we will boost this. We are a bit wary in a sense, because we have 1.3 million members and grew by 40,000 members last year. You have to be careful about how you can manage and grow that new demand. Success can be a big problem at times.

Q109 Lord Hampton: Carrying on from this very strong discussion we have had already on education, I have to declare that I am a secondary school teacher. We have heard quite a lot of evidence—actually surprising evidence—that education is not the social leveller we thought it was and that what goes in comes out in a lot of ways. Given the very strong interest you all have in education, probably starting with Andy Case, how can schools and colleges, and the teaching that takes place in them, contribute even more? Given the fact that we do not get all the money in the world, what else can we do? What barriers are stopping you from the ultimate idea of everybody being socially mobile?

Andy Case: It is a fundamental question. It is good to see that there were some members of this committee on the Education for 11–16 Year Olds Committee as well. I know that it did a lot of work on that and we really welcomed the report that came out of that. Some of the people who were on that may well have heard similar things to what I am about to say here, because things are the same as then.

You are right to say that, in theory, the teaching of the curriculum that goes on in schools, if it is fit for the future and is giving students the knowledge, skills and competencies that are going to contribute towards them getting the jobs of the future, would help with social mobility. Many across the sector—certainly, that is the view of NEU members—think that we are not in that place right at the moment.

You will very likely be aware that the Government have commissioned a curriculum assessment review, which is ongoing at the moment. That is a cross-party issue of agreement. It is the current Government instigating that particular review, but most parties were advocating for some type of reform of the curriculum. It is well understood that something fundamental needs to change.

From our point of view, the curriculum itself is outdated. It is far too narrow. Not enough students have access to the full range of subjects, the arts, technical and vocational subjects in particular, and it is too big. There is too much stuff to get through. If you are not meaningfully able to get through everything in the time allocated, you are not doing justice to students, because it is going to be piecemeal and rushed. That is through no fault or lack of effort from our members trying to teach those students in those schools. Cross-sector, in many organisations, but our own in particular, members, including the majority of teachers in key stage 4—I think that there is a particular issue with GCSE—are reporting that there is far too much to teach in the time allowed.

To some of the points that we spoke about earlier, that is a key example of where trade unions can have a role, speaking to the people on the ground and trying to implement the policies of government. When GCSEs were reformed, straight off the bat it was clear to teachers that the size of them was going to be unmanageable in two years. The Government were adamant that they were going to be teachable within two years and, categorically, you can see from many sources that that is just not the case. Fortunately, it seems to have been picked up in the interim report that we have had from the curriculum and assessment review so far that there is some work that needs to be done there.

As well as size, it is quite a job to reduce, update and refresh, because it means you have to take away some stuff in the first instance, and then take away some more and replace it with things that are more fit for the future. What we have experienced a lot more with the curriculum in recent years is an over-focus, we would say, on knowledge. It is always a balance between knowledge, skills and competencies that you would want students to develop, but the assessment system in particular has skewed the focus far more towards what you can learn—individual pieces of information—and whether you can regurgitate that in an exam.

The vast majority of entries at GCSE are 100% assessed via exam and so you are not going to cultivate the types of skills that many organisations, such as the OECD and NFER, suggest you are going to need for the jobs of the future. There is a particular report from NFER about what the key skills for jobs in 2035 and beyond are going to be. It is problem solving, communication and collaboration. Yes, it is having knowledge, but being able not just to state something but to apply it in a new context. The world changes quickly and the system we have currently does not help with that.

I would like to make a particular point on the arts and technical and vocational subjects, as I mentioned that at the start. They are significantly squeezed from the curriculum. In primary schools, we have seen from data from our members that English and maths now account for more than half of the teaching time across all year groups, and that is a significant increase. If you think that the literacy and numeracy strategies of the early 2000s were aiming for an hour a day of each, that would be ten hours a week. We are now at, on average, 12 of English and maths, and that has consequences. That removes other things from the curriculum. As you can probably imagine, it is expensive things, such as the arts, music and DT, that end up, unfortunately, being lost.

It is similar in secondary. I know that the 11-16 committee particularly focused on this point with the EBacc, but it has significantly reduced the breadth of subjects, categorically. I am sure it has been covered already, but the English baccalaureate is a performance measure that is used for schools. It incentivises, or we would say forces, schools, particularly in a climate of underfunding, to focus on the core subjects of English, maths, science and history. Of course, those are all important, but it means that the arts and everything else that is not in the EBacc, such as PE, music and vocational subjects, get squeezed out.

To make the point in terms of data, since the EBacc’s introduction, those non-EBacc subjects have reduced by a third. There are a third fewer entries in those non-EBacc subjects, so the arts, music, vocational subjects et cetera.

That is specifically to what is taught and how the curriculum is out of date, but I could probably go on for a long time as well about the wider issues in education. If you want an education system to deliver whatever the curriculum is, it needs to be properly funded and it needs highly qualified, experienced teachers to stay in the profession. A third of teachers leave five years after becoming qualified. Teachers are leaving at their highest rate ever. Funding is as low as it has been for a couple of decades. It is difficult.

In preparing for this, I was reminded of the adage that, if you have too many priorities, you almost do not have any. I am conscious and wary of falling into that trap in listing the number of things that are a problem at the moment, but it cannot be stated enough that there are a number of issues that are seriously holding the education system back from being as effective as it could be.

The Chair: There was quite a lot of stuff packed up in that that we will need to digest. Is there any follow-up?

Andy Murray: I am coming very much from the further and higher education part of the system. You are asking me what will improve people’s ability to progress through that system and be socially mobile as a result. The obvious thing is that we need to put in both of those areas—the same would apply to schools—the appropriate support mechanisms for pupils going through the system. We welcome the move towards emphasising special educational needs. That puts major funding pressure on local authorities, but it is a good initiative to do that.

Frankly, going back to further and higher education, the funding systems need to be reviewed and reformed. Certainly in higher education, we cannot carry on with the current funding system. It is complicated, because it depends which part of the UK you study in. If you take England, three pillars of the funding system are tuition fees, direct government funding of teaching and research, which is a key area, and the one that is causing all the problems at the moment, which is an overreliance on fees from foreign students. That is obviously impacted by the immigration policies and the net migration Act 2023, for example. I think that it has cut the level of foreign students by 15% at the moment.

A core element, as well as the funding, is a lack of an industrial strategy. The education system should feed into where we want the country to be in 20 years’ time. I do not think that we have had a consistent industrial strategy, which, in a sense, the education system could then help get us to, in terms of the objective. That is a core issue.

Jon Richards: We represent support staff in the education sector, so school support staff in particular. There are issues, as we know, about absence. There are issues around behaviour. There are issues that the staff I look after deal with. That is why we train people on behavioural management.

There are also some issues where we have been trying to change the way that the system works. Historically, our teaching assistants would do onetoone work with special educational needs students. We have been working with the Education Endowment Foundation, which is a research institute that the Government fund—the previous Government funded it a lot and the current Government are doing so too—to change methods. The most disadvantaged SEND pupils need teaching time more than teaching assistant time. If you get into a programme where teaching assistants are taught how to run the general class, not to teach, but just to run through the programme while the teacher is able to go and spend time with disadvantaged and special educational needs pupils, you can boost their education outcomes.

We are keen on working on developing programmes for teaching assistants, because that allows them to be skilled. If we could put that in place—because we do not have proper career run-through—you could get teaching assistants running through to become teachers. Teaching assistants are more diverse. They come from different ethnic and diverse backgrounds, which would help the problems we have around diverse teacher recruitment. There is a big piece of work we are trying to do that would develop that. I hope that that support which allows pupils to get back into school would also be beneficial to social mobility.

Q110 Baroness Blower: Specifically in relation to social mobility, in the 11-16 committee, but also in this committee, we have heard representations about the problems that there are with GCSE English and maths. I think that we are all familiar with the number of kids who do not achieve that at 16, fail, then have to resit and so on. Given that that gatekeeps quite a lot of places to which students can potentially progress, are there any remarks that you would like to make about examinations at 16 in particular?

Andy Case: I can talk on that. We would agree that the resit policy post 16 is a barrier for a lot of people. Interestingly, I would point people towards an OECD report, and we can follow up with this as well if it is helpful. I think that it was towards the end of last year. It was really interesting because it was comparing GCSE equivalent—I think that it was maths in that instance—qualifications in this country to other countries around the world. It pointed out, similarly to what a lot of people on the ground say, that perhaps the level of demand is higher and not equivalent to similar qualifications in other countries.

As I spoke about earlier, the method of assessment and content of those qualifications is very knowledge-focused, academic and perhaps, as a former maths teacher myself, a little more abstract than what might be useful for people going into the workplace. There are a few alternative qualifications at level 2, which GCSE is, in the UK at the moment, but they are not necessarily used in the same way as that condition of funding and for allowing students to progress on to their next steps. The recommendation for the UK Government from that report was to consider alternative options for students post 16 and we would absolutely support that.

Q111 Lord Hampton: Jon Richards, you said that you spend a lot of time educating people who have not done well in the education system and you talked about careers guidance. From the outside, looking at the education system, is there something that you think could fundamentally change?

Jon Richards: That is a big question. Someone here described the people we represent as blue-collar workers. Our people ca be people who have failed, or have been through the FE system or other areas and have therefore been seen by some to be failures. One thing we do—I hate the phrase “parity of esteem”—is build other tracks. I mentioned apprenticeships. We are doing some work with employers, and I will speak a bit later about this, about boosting apprenticeships and how you make those to be seen as more important. Lord Baker has done a lot of work on this , which we support and think is really positive.

It is not because we think that HE is not the best. My kids went to higher education. I went to higher education; I was the first in my family . We need to find some way for people to come out of the education system not feeling like they have been dumped and been unable to fulfil their potential.

We have seen problems with careers guidance because it has suffered over the years through several restructures. It went through Connexions. It has now been put into schools. It has always been seen as a bit of a Cinderella service. We are going through the latest restructure and putting it in Jobcentre Plus. Will that work? I hope that it will.

We would like to build a career service that integrates into schools and feels properly part of schools, but that also has some independence. Pupils are nervous of going through a careers guidance process that is totally run by schools. Having some form of independent structure or external system that allows pupils access, and to have face-to-face career guidance and work experience, is a really important part of building on some of the gaps we have in the education system. If you had that sort of stuff, the system would be more attractive and we could bring pupils back in. We would be keen to work with employers and schools on that.

Lord Hampton: What about with Skills England?

Jon Richards: Yes, absolutely.

Q112 Lord Watts: Can I follow up on the independence of the careers service? It seemed to me that, when it was with local authorities, the independence meant that it could offer the young people a wide range of subjects. If it is in the school, the school often has an interest in shoving kids in a certain way, given its staffing levels. Is the independence crucial, do you think?

Jon Richards: There has been an ongoing debate internationally around careers guidance . I agree that having some form of independence allows you to give wider guidance. The previous Government tried to do it by encouraging employers to come in, but you suffer from the same situation. Which employers do you bring in? If you bring in the local business, do you encourage people to go into that local business? How do you get that independent advice that gives people a range?

To be fair, some of the previous services that we supported and worked in were not great. It is fair to say that Connexions was patchy. At its best, it was really great. The local authority services at their best were great, but often they were not. Trying to develop a career service that is independent and has enough knowledge is difficult. That is one thing that the recent government reforms have done. The previous Government’s reforms denuded the wider knowledge of careers guidance, because they placed it in schools. You had a wider system via Connexions services.

The slight disconnect you got from the National Careers Service has been a bit of a problem. Maybe the new government reforms—I am being very on the fence on that—will build those links in. Having some sort of wider database on skills and knowledge, and being able to update that, is really important.

The Chair: Lady Garden’s question is on universities, which you have already touched on in some of your answers, but there are probably gaps too.

Q113 Baroness Garden of Frognal: We have had a range of evidence about the significance of universities in promoting mobility through widening access for learners from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. You already mentioned the Open University, which has done a fantastic job in encouraging learners. How can, or do, trade unions support these initiatives and how successful are they in that?

Coming back to one of the underlying themes, young people having confidence in learning is incredibly important. They can get that initial confidence by passing an initial exam. I worked for City & Guilds for 20 years. You could see that people who got very lowly vocational qualifications suddenly got a confidence that they could learn something. How can universities help with all this great progression?

Andy Murray: I deal with the universities in my role as national officer for Unite. It is about access to universities. You are quite right. I referred to it earlier. The role of a teacher is about imparting knowledge and all that, but I always saw the core element as building self-confidence in the student and giving them belief. I have mentioned the word “resilience” because things go wrong and you have to be able to deal with it.

The current funding system of higher education is heavily reliant on tuition fees. I am talking about England here, per se. That means that students are going to build up debt. They just do. That is something I did not have. I was lucky enough to go to university when I think only—I will not give the year—5% of the population went to university and we had maintenance grants and things like that. You could live on the grant.

The Chair: Mr Murray, many of those on the committee are in the same category, so you need not worry about your age. We do have exceptions.

Andy Murray: The increase in student debt is an issue and it is going to put students off. The other thing that is noticeable is that, increasingly, students from poorer backgrounds will not travel. They are not going to go to a university that is 200 miles away. They will go to a university that is local because they will want to cut down on the cost. They will not want to have to pay a huge amount for staying in a newly built student accommodation block. That is an issue.

A lot of universities do good things around trying to provide support services for students from poorer backgrounds and help them in many ways. In the current situation, where finance is everything and you are seeing a cutback in courses, a cutback in staff is not going to help. This country has to make a decision, and I have said this to a number of people, particularly now given developments outside of this country. Do you want to expand your higher education system? Is it fundamental to achieving high levels of economic growth and prosperity? Do you want to start to cut back on it, in fact? Do you want to reduce it back down to—I do not know—the kind of situation there was in the 1950s, I suppose, to quote you? From my perspective, it is absolutely key for this country to maintain a good, diverse higher education sector that also supports specialist institutions, such as art schools and veterinary schools. It is absolutely key.

You will not be surprised to hear that I am a big supporter of the decision 25 years ago—no, more than that now—to increase the number of people going to university. I thought that that was a good development. A lot of people complain about that and say, “They end up doing Mickey Mouse degrees, and they come out and can’t get a job”. That is because we do not have a proper industrial strategy. That is the reason.

You have to make a decision. Do you want to be a country that promotes high-skilled, well-paid jobs? Are you going to be a country that says, “No, we don’t do that. We are going to just go for low-paid jobs and promote those types of areas”? I cannot see how you get economic growth without people having bigger incomes. It may be a bit dull, but that is the way I see it. Yes, it is key.

The Chair: Ms Bell, do you have anything to add?

Kate Bell: I had a point to Baroness Blower’s point earlier. You will have seen that the Government have relaxed some of the functional requirements for apprenticeships with their construction skills announcement. That was to your English and maths point. We see that as a positive and a route into those high-quality apprenticeships.

To add to Andy’s points about the higher education sector, it is a sector in crisis. One in two universities is making job cuts. That is a major issue for us. The other point about diverse routes into higher education is the importance of something we have called for for a long time, which is a midlife careers review, so somebody expressly saying to you, “Where are you in your career? What opportunities to learn might you want?” We think that there is a real role for union learning reps in doing that. Maybe when you went to school university was not the route for you. Of course, it can be a route later in life. Ensuring that there is that regular check-in or midlife careers review is something we have called for for a long time. It is also a critical route to thinking about how people might access different forms of education at different times in their lives.

Jon Richards: Can I give a quick practical example of some of the things about access that Andy sad? My stepdaughter chose not to go to the middle-class school up the hill that most of her friends went to. She chose to go to a more challenging school with a lot of diversity and a lot of issues. For them, the problem is getting to school at sixth-form level. While you are under 16, you get access to free travel. Once you hit 16, you do not. Some of them have precarious environments.

This is in Peckham. There was a couple of her friends who lived in Peckham, but they could not get a council house, so one had to move to Erith. Another one has moved down to Croydon. They have to get in every day to school to study for their A-levels. That is a really discouraging thing to do, particularly because we got rid of support for 16 to 18 year-olds. As a pensioner living in London, I get free travel.

The Chair: Nobody on this panel does, of course.

Jon Richards: It seems wrong that I, as someone who is still working, should get that, while 16 to 18 year-olds do not.

Baroness Garden of Frognal: It is a real problem for rural schools and coastal schools.

Jon Richards: Absolutely, yes. A practical issue is supporting children in difficult circumstances to get access to school that allows them to get qualifications. A lot of those children will not travel to different environments far away.

The Chair: This is a theme that the committee has heard already. Thank you for covering it.

Q114 Lord Johnson of Marylebone: I wanted to ask about the narrowing of educational options at age 16, with the defunding of applied general qualifications and the increasingly binary choice that students have between T-levels, which are not really being taken up in any significant numbers, and A-levels, predominantly, for the more academically inclined. What is the panel’s view on the Department for Education’s move towards a very binary choice between T-levels and A-levels in this space? Do you think that there is a continuing need to maintain an alternative path for those not well served by those two options?

Andy Case: Yes. We completely support the move of many in the sector to campaign for the retaining of particularly applied general qualifications. I was going to try to get in to speak about those. In terms of access to university, they are key. They are disproportionately used by students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to access higher education and they exist at the moment. They are trusted by employers, universities, educators and students.

Countries around the world all struggle with trying to find that balance between what you might describe as more academic and more vocational routes. We have a set of qualifications. There is lots more that could be done in this country—do not get me wrong—but we have a set of qualifications that already exist and that try to finely walk that tightrope or find that balance. They act as a tool for social mobility by enabling more students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to access higher education. To get rid of those would be a retrograde step. We completely support them remaining within the system.

Jon Richards: It is hard to argue against it. The Government paused a little to say that they were going to keep some funding around BTECs and other qualifications We would wish them to continue that as long as possible, because we think having this more diverse route is important.

It is perfectly logical, and the previous Government did it as well, to try to slim down some qualifications, because clearly there was a whole series of stuff. I used to sit on the board of qualifications provider CACHE, , which did nursery nurse qualifications. You looked at the early years market and there was a huge boom among private sector companies, to set up loads of different qualifications. I am not having a go at private sector companies, because that is what you do, but to allow them to set up a whole range of qualifications, large numbers of which did not actually help you get into work, is the wrong way. Slimming it down is perfectly right, but narrowing that down to o much is wrong. I would absolutely agree.

Q115 Lord Ravensdale: We have heard a lot of evidence from employers on some of the work they are doing to encourage better socioeconomic diversity in their workforce. There is a lot of really good work being done there in how they assess applications, data collection and working with schools in disadvantaged areas. What is your view on such initiatives that employers are undertaking? What involvement, if any, do trade unions have in those initiatives?

Kate Bell: In 2019, the TUC called for more widespread and potentially statutory reporting on socioeconomic status in the same way as we do gender pay gap reporting. We can see with gender pay gap reporting how that has not been one quick solution to change, but it has driven change and transparency. We think that, potentially, mandatory reporting on socioeconomic status would do the same thing.

To talk more generally, trade unions’ role in the workplace is to support fair recruitment systems, fair progression systems, and transparent pay and grading systems, all of which contribute towards fairness at work. One thing that we are very pleased that the Employment Rights Bill currently with you in the House of Lords is doing is giving statutory duties to equality reps, who often play a key role in ensuring that those processes are in place.

Jon Richards: We are very keen on doing social mobility pledges with employers. We want to create some targeted apprenticeship programmes, return to learn and learning agreements with employers. Over the last decade or so we have not been encouraged into that space. The role of trade unions has quite narrowed down to pay, conditions and other stuff. It is why all you hear about in the news is pay and conditions disputes, whereas historically our role was also about learning, development and creating a wider society , so we have always wanted to be involved in that.

We used to have a much larger role in designing apprenticeships. We were cut out of that a few years ago. We had to force our way into the teaching assistant apprenticeship programme just to get on the steering group. We were able to show that we had the skills that would help the group develop that. The apprenticeship programmes are quite bitty now, so they do not link through. As I said, we would be very keen to design programmes that allow TAs to become teachers. We would be very keen to help out in that, even though it means we hand over members to the NEU, UCU or others. It is in the interest of our members to develop, get on, grow and have career development.

We would love to be involved in wider education areas. As you mentioned Skills England, we have already started to have discussions with Skills England. We are working with various skills commissions. The TUC is doing huge amounts of work in that area. Absolutely, bring us on board and we will help out where we can.

Andy Murray: I will give you one example from the university sector. In the university sector, Unite represents technicians and estate staff. Those are the groups we represent primarily. On the technicians, I think there used to be an assumption that there would always be university technicians in place to help out in the labs, with the AV and all that type of thing. Increasingly, I do not think that that is the case because of a suppression of pay in the sector, which is a real issue. The latest offer, by the way, is 1.4%. That is what we have been offered this year and last week. RPI is 4.5% as of yesterday. These people will go and work for other employers as private researchers. They will move.

We are supporting what is called the Technician Commitment, which is there to assist in giving proper career progression for technicians. It is being introduced; a lot of universities have signed up to it. We are promoting that and having very positive discussions with universities about trying to retain staff in the sector. Not only are they making people redundant, but they are in danger of losing people who they want to keep, unless they can give them proper career routes.

Lord Ravensdale: I have a brief clarification. Kate, you mentioned the 2019 TUC report and I think one of the things you talked about is this legal duty on public bodies to make tackling class and income inequality a priority. Is that covered by the current Government’s plans to enact the socioeconomic duty in the Equality Act?

Kate Bell: That is what we see as the critical step. The Government have just launched a call for evidence on how they might achieve that and that is something we will be submitting to.

Jon Richards: The work around the monitoring of ethnic and gender pay gaps will be really helpful in supporting that work. That will allow us to really dig into why there are gaps in the workplace and why maybe people are not being encouraged to go into some areas.

The Chair: One thing the committee has heard a lot about is NEETs. It is a very unfortunate phrase in my view, but covering a number of fairly major concerns. Lord Young would like to ask a question to start off a discussion on this.

Q116 Lord Young of Cookham: As we have heard from the Chair, we have been focusing on the 900,000 young people who are not in education, employment or training. If we are to unlock opportunities for them and improve their social mobility, we need to get them into the jobs market. If you look at the jobs market at the moment, there are some sectors that are really looking for people. You have the residential care sector, teaching, nursing, agriculture and the armed forces. What more do we need to do to unlock this resource of all these young people, particularly as the Government have made it clear that we cannot continue to rely on inward migration to fill some of these gaps? What do we need to do to square the circle?

Kate Bell: The Government have made an important step forward in committing to their youth guarantee. That is for 18 to 21 year-olds and is suggesting that every young person will have a route into education, apprenticeship or employment. We need this to be a cross-government priority and we think that a target for reducing the number of NEETs will be a good mechanism to drive some of that cross-government action. Critically, it needs some funding. The Government have talked about reform of the apprenticeship levy and a growth and skills levy. Making sure that that delivers on opportunities for young people is going to be really important.

We know that this particular cohort of young people have a range of additional challenges. Many of them will have been at school during Covid and prevalence of mental health and other conditions is higher, so there needs to be some thinking about how that guarantee offers support for those people.

There are some real opportunities here. As you said, we have expanding sectors. We are promised an industrial strategy. We have a Government who are going to deliver a 10-year infrastructure strategy. As well as ensuring that we have commitments from Government and that cross‑government approach to drive funding, we can also be asking for commitments from employers.

There are great examples. I was at Hinkley Point a week and a half ago, I think. It is a large nuclear site with 15,000 people on site and a huge apprenticeship programme, including the employer investing in the local college to make sure it has the training and skills it needs. You can see that in other large infrastructure projects.

Those have been real critical opportunities to say, “We are creating a large amount of employment. Let’s make sure that that creates opportunities for skills for people”. That needs a partnership between government, employers and trade unions to make sure that the training routes are right, the local provision is in place and we have the investment in that further education, but also to make sure that employers are saying, “We will create those training routes and, once you’ve done that training, you will have a decent job to go to”.

I was talking to members of our young workers committee yesterday who were saying that, for many young people, the prospect of a job is a low‑paid, zero-hours contract, intermittent job where you may face abuse on a daily basis. We have seen stats about abuse in the retail sector, the hospitality sector increasingly and our public services. Particularly if you have had a difficult experience in education, that is not going to be an attractive proposition. That cross-government approach to tackling this has to be about putting the funding in place, leveraging our other spending commitments, whether that is in infrastructure or through the industrial strategy, and ensuring that employers are involved, along with that big effort to improve the quality of work so that the jobs that young people go into are jobs they are going to stay in, will flourish in and can progress in.

Lord Young of Cookham: Can I ask a difficult question? Is there a role for reviewing the benefits system to encourage young people into employment?

Kate Bell: At the moment, the benefits system often puts up barriers, in that it puts you on a very binary path between working or not working. It makes it much harder if you want to combine education with work. I think the Government have said they want to look at that particular gap for 18 to 21 year-olds, and we think that that might go to 24 year-olds, so that you are not forced down a route of being, at the jobcentre, pushed into a job and off benefits altogether.

One increasing problem we have is that people are not engaging with the benefits system at all because of those binary choices that it pushes people into. Enabling a more flexible approach would recognise that people will have different routes into learning and work. We absolutely want everybody to be on one of those routes, but the benefits system could be more sophisticated in how it supports people.

Andy Murray: I was going to mention two issues. If you want to get people who are not engaged in the workforce at the moment, or in the economy, if we put it that way, back in there, once again, keeping them in education is a key area. Giving them routes that are going to give them long-term prospects is very important. I have spent a lot of time talking about universities in my contributions this morning, but this is where I come back to further education.

Further education has a key role in engaging young people and keeping them in education. It is absolutely key. I have been involved for over 30 years in it. My view is that what the Government want out of further education has never been clearly defined. It falls between the stools of higher education and schools. It is that other bit that has to be funded. It is absolutely key to bringing in that particular group, keeping them in education and then, by keeping them in education, getting them into jobs. It is fundamental to it.

One thing I should mention here is changes to the apprenticeship levy. We welcome changes to the apprenticeship levy. From Unite’s perspective, we are very keen that all the money that is raised through the apprenticeship levy is used for apprenticeships. They are key for getting that particular group in.

The other point I want to make, which I mentioned earlier on in my introduction, was around youth work. We welcome the Government’s decision for the Minister for Youth, Stephanie Peacock MP, to develop a national youth strategy. We were talking to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport a few weeks ago about that at Unite. We went in, because we represent youth workers.

To deliver a youth strategy, you need youth workers in place. Those kinds of services, particularly those delivered through local authorities, have been decimated over the last 20 years or so. We are in favour of increasing the number of youth workers, definitely, as is the National Youth Agency, by the way, but we need to ensure that those youth workers are properly trained to do the work. If you are going to engage with those particular groups, who are normally made up of vulnerable people, they must be trained to the highest standards. We are in favour of maintaining for youth worker status a level 6 qualification, which is a university qualification. The National Youth Agency is currently consulting over different qualifications, which we are not in favour of, and bringing it down to level 3 or level 4. That is key.

Jon Richards: I have two quick things. First, a number of the job groups you named are seen as low value. There is a perception issue among young people, not helped sometimes by what the Government say. Whether you agree or not with the recent stuff on immigration, the way it was presented by the Government was that social care was a low-value, low-skilled workforce. What enticement is there for people to go into the workforce if they know they are going into an environment where they are going to get low pay and it is low value and low skill?

There is work to be done on what we value as a society and see as important, particularly as we are all ageing people in here and will need more social care and social care support. There is work for the Government to do about the value of some of those roles. In hospitality, if you look at other parts of the world, they see hospitality as a valued career. Again, we do not value that career. There is work to be done on careers—I would push careers of course—about how we value hospitality and how we see things in that context.

The second thing is about opportunities that we will have with devolution. We are potentially moving down a route to devolution. Every Government always say they are going to do devolution, but we never actually get down to it. Devolution would mean we were able to locate skills locally. You could have partnerships between local authorities and employers. Hopefully, we would get invited to help out as well. That allows you to encourage people to get involved in those careers.

In some areas, you have seasonal work, and there are real difficulties attracting people to that. We know that professionals tend to marry and and group together. How can we encourage those people into difficult areas, such as seasonal resorts? We can do lot of work around that, which devolution could really drive.

Q117 Lord Johnson of Marylebone: The NEET rate, as we have heard, is at its highest level in a decade or so. Does the panel feel the combination of the big increase in the national minimum wage and the increase in the rate of national insurance contributions has played a part by raising employment costs to businesses and making it harder for them to offer entry-level positions?

Kate Bell: No would be the brief answer. The NEET rate has been rising for some time. It is a really worrying trend, but we think it has much more to do with the conditions around Covid and the lack of support that we have been describing over the last decade for those routes into youth work.

It is worth saying that I was on the Low Pay Commission for quite a long time. The national minimum wage for young people has been rising for some time. The Low Pay Commission has been consistently looking to see whether that has had a negative employment impact on young people and has not been able to find any evidence whatever of the national minimum wage having a negative impact on young people’s employment.

The worrying trend of unemployment in young people is going up, but it has not kinked at the point when the increases to national insurance contributions or the minimum wage have come into place. The national minimum wage increases follow a trend that has been in place at least since 2015. The significant increases in the national minimum wage have been researched time and time again, with no evidence of employment impact.

Q118 Lord Watts: Just picking up the point about FE, many years ago when I was chairman of education and chairman of an FE college, we took kids from school and put them in the FE sector. That was illegal at the time because kids were supposed to go to school until they were 16. Are there any barriers to stop that sort of initiative now? Is that still in place or are there still barriers to kids who are in schools being offered vocational studies—bricklayers, car mechanics and all that sort of thing—that they are very keen to do?

Jon Richards: The idea behind the technical schools that Lord Baker introduced was to move people into those vocational areas.. There was a desire to see whether that worked. They have not proved to be as popular as was hoped. Quite a few have closed down, so I am not sure that experiment has worked. Lots of us thought that might be quite an interesting way to go and could be helpful, but they have closed down and not proved popular.

There is a real difficulty about the transition at 14 when you leave your school to join a technical school . You have gone to another school for two years and then all of a sudden you transition to a new one. You have built friends; you have a friendship group. That proves quite difficult. They have not proved to be as popular as they might be. I think that was the Government’s attempt to go half way between.

Lord Watts: We were targeting kids who were not in school. We found that was an effective way of getting them to do some training and building them up for the future.

Jon Richards: The idea behind the T-levels was to try to get people focused on that.

Kate Bell: I have now forgotten whether it was the last Government who raised the participation age to 18. I think so. That was meant to say that everyone should be in some form of education to 18, including further education.

One of the issues, which, to be fair, the current Government’s youth guarantee is meant to be addressing, is that people have not been monitoring what has happened as a consequence of that. The raising of the participation age was not accompanied with enough of a strategy to say, “We want everyone in something. What exactly is that thing going to be?”

Andy Case: You asked a question earlier about the changes in careers advice. This is similar, in the sense that this is looking at the advice when you are 16 and what your next steps might be. That is just one example. You talked about the barriers to that type of initiative.

I would look at the general barriers that exist in education at the moment with a significantly less well-funded system. Ultimately, careers advice is an example where you used to have specialists who were funded to do that. Now it is an additional expectation on schools and teachers. There is no ill will to try to force them down one route or another. It is just not necessarily their area of expertise. These days, teachers and leaders have to be mental health experts. They are acting as food banks and clothes banks. They are having to try to fill in the services that have disappeared more widely in society as well as within education itself.

Those things ultimately cause barriers to any effective movement anywhere within the system.

The Chair: We have heard similar evidence from other people, Mr Case. We have two other biggish questions, one on the significance of place and one on the role of government. I am going to turn to Lord Evans to ask the next one.

Q119 Lord Evans of Rainow: One of the issues that the committee has chosen to focus on is the difference in social mobility rates between different regions within the UK. The committee attended a very interesting area in Blackpool the week before last. We have heard that local partnerships between, for example, universities, local employers and local authorities can play a role in developing local responses to address this. How effective are these initiatives? Is there a role for union involvement in such partnerships, and, if so, what?

Andy Murray: Let us be absolutely clear. One key element of the university sector that may have been overlooked is the role that the local university plays in the local economy. You can go to any big city. I was in Sheffield yesterday. You walk out of Sheffield station, and there is Sheffield Hallam University right in front of you. They are core employers. They provide local businesses with massive business through the students and the accommodation, et cetera. You name it.

Should there be local partnerships between universities, employers and local authorities? Absolutely, there should be. As I say, they are fundamental to their local communities. If those local partnerships can increase the number of people who stay in education and get pathways into work, that is absolutely to everyone’s benefit. It is a great idea.

What role do trade unions play in that? It is two-way, is it not? Unite the Union is a big general union. We have members who work in education, as I have clearly outlined to you, as well as members who work in big manufacturing companies and big finance companies. You name it. We have a wide membership.

The work that we do with employers to encourage those partnerships is two-way. That might be a big manufacturing company. The Rolls-Royces of this world in Derby, or something like that, would be a classic example. We work with them to ensure that their workforce is being replenished and that people are being brought in and properly trained. We work with universities and the local further education college, which should be an important part of that partnership, to make sure that they are enabling people to come on to their courses and take advantage. That is a general answer.

The Chair: I will allow Lord Young, who is bursting with a question, to come in before I come to the rest of the panel to contribute.

Q120 Lord Young of Cookham: What you said about partnerships, Andy, is crucial. Who should be in the lead in setting up those partnerships between the local authority, the university and employers?

Andy Murray: That is a good one. Initially, I would probably say the local authority. That would be my view. It has to be somebody. The responsibility initially lies with the local authority. It has to be government-led in some way, whether that is central government-led or local government-led.

Kate Bell: There is a role for the combined authorities at a cross-regional level. Maybe that speaks to the point that I wanted to make. Somebody showed me a map yesterday that maps youth unemployment on to former industrial areas. It is pretty clear that the pockets of youth unemployment map on to areas where jobs disappeared during the 1980s in the former industrial areas of the country. It is very stark how clear the link is between those things.

When we are looking at tackling regional inequality, which is basically what this is, the role of the industrial strategy is so important. It is also a massive opportunity for the Government to think about where new industries are going to be based and how they might provide new opportunities; think about infrastructure investment, which will not only increase connectivity between those areas—we have talked about the role of transport previously—but create opportunities as we develop that infrastructure; think about how we are developing the supply chains necessary to feed into those industries; and, throughout that, keep thinking about how every one of those interventions offers opportunities for the young people in that area to get into the decent-quality jobs that we should create.

Those partnerships are absolutely vital, but seeing that mission around youth unemployment as a whole-of-government initiative should help drive those decisions, with the aim of making sure not only that we are rebuilding the country but that we are rebuilding opportunities for young people to get those jobs.

Lord Evans of Rainow: Andy, you made the point about Unite the Union and how they tend to be big organisations. You mentioned Rolls-Royce. I work for Airbus and I worked with the Unite members at Airbus during the pandemic, using transferable skills from making aircraft wings to make life-saving ventilators. Daz Reynolds was the union convener. I will name-check her. She was outstanding. It is a wonderful example.

The evidence in Blackpool, Kate, was not about the big employers, although we have BAE Systems down at Preston. The local authority was very original in thinking about how it could work with the college that we had. The local employers, which are key to this, were not the big employers that you represent. They were small and medium-sized enterprises. There were a couple of hospitality people there. The beauty of hospitality is that you can go from bar to boardroom and anything in between.

The feedback that they gave to us, as my noble friend said, was about national insurance and the minimum wage. It is very good in some circumstances, but if these small and medium-size enterprises have a bad season—it is a seaside resort—that puts pressure on the profitability of their businesses.

They also talked about their concerns over first-day rights, which are going through with the Employment Rights Bill now. If they take a risk employing a young person who may be a NEET, they could end up in significant trouble. That was the feedback that we got from those small and medium-sized enterprises, which are a massive part of the economy.

Kate Bell: To talk about the hospitality sector in particular, sometimes there is a bit of tension in what it says. Again, this comes from my experience at the Low Pay Commission, where we spoke to hospitality businesses regularly. During the pandemic in particular, we heard a lot from hospitality businesses about how they were really struggling to recruit staff and they realised that they needed a different employment model. One in four people in hospitality is on a zero-hours contract at the moment.

Lord Evans of Rainow: That is the nature of the business, though.

Kate Bell: It does not need to be the nature of the business. My colleagues talked about how hospitality is viewed very differently in other countries. It is run on a different business model. One of the things those businesses regularly said to us was, “It was so great when we could get European staff because they were so well trained. They really valued the business and they built a career in the business”.

The question you have to ask back is, “What is different about those business models?” What is different about the pay and conditions of those staff that has enabled them to invest in training and to build a career in the hospitality business? You are using staff who have benefited from a different business model.

Those businesses are creative. They are innovative. They are able to adapt to a different business model. The experience of chefs is one example of that. Pay and conditions for chefs have changed massively since the pandemic in response to staff shortages. Those hospitality businesses showed they could adapt to a different business model.

I think they can adapt to a different business model as is being asked of them by the Employment Rights Bill. I have every confidence in their ability to do that and to run a successful business. It will be a business model that offers better opportunities for those staff to progress and better opportunities to retain staff. Staff turnover is a huge issue in the hospitality business. They have the creativity and ingenuity to do that.

Jon Richards: I absolutely agree with Kate. My brother runs pubs in south London. That is what he tells me. He does moan about minimum wage, however.

What was I going to say? I have just lost my train of thought.

The Chair: Do not worry. That happens to many of us.

Jon Richards: I know what I was going to say. There are some interesting models in parts of the north, places such as Preston and Wigan, where they are looking at community wealth building. Rather than doing big procurement projects with large multinational companies such as Veolia or Mitie, you can invest in small and medium-sized enterprises. The whole idea of having community wealth, which is then reinvested in the environment and builds thatarea, is worth looking at.

They often talk themselves up a bit more than the results that have come out so far, but none the less there is some really interesting stuff there. If you want to look at alternative models, I would look at places such as Preston and Wigan. It is really interesting to see how that might help social mobility.

Andy Case: I can talk less about specific partnerships between employers and others, but, to the point about regional differences, that is something we see in education as well. The fact that you find different rates of social mobility in different areas is not surprising. If you want to address that, in an ideal world you would want an equal experience of education for everyone across the piece. That gives them the best chance of having the social mobility that perhaps is being seen in other areas.

For example, in areas of lower socioeconomic status there are fewer experienced teachers. Teachers move around more and they leave the profession more. The challenges in those areas, as we have discussed and as you will have heard in many different ways, are very likely a cause of that.

Within the education system, the accountability measures that are used, performance tables and Ofsted ratings, which are labelling, punitive and not supportive of improving schools, ramp up the pressure in those areas. They have further consequences of the types of symptoms that I spoke of before about having a younger and less experienced workforce.

Although access to a broad curriculum is a big issue across the piece, as I mentioned, the data shows that that is more keenly felt in areas where there are more disadvantaged students. Even less time is spent on the arts and vocational subjects, and more time is spent on that core.

The Chair: We are working towards the role of government in this, but Lord Ravensdale has a supplementary at this stage that he wants to ask.

Q121 Lord Ravensdale: Regional differences have come up quite a bit. Kate, you mentioned the role of combined authorities. Of course, combined authorities are quite limited in their coverage. In the Midlands, where I am from, perhaps half the population is covered by a combined authority. We do not really have any bodies that are looking across regions as a whole. Is that regional view a gap in this space?

Kate Bell: Yes.

Jon Richards: There is potentially a role for Skills England in identifying those gaps, how to fill those, how to create things such as local skills boards and how you work around and adapt to that. It has become quite bitty, has it not?

That is the problem. You have local government structures that are no longer coherent. Trying to design a model from central government is going to be very difficult. If we can build a system where Skills England identifies some of those gaps, we can build up local skills boards—where we have combined authorities, we use them; where we do not, we use others—and there are some patterns of linking with employers and SMEs, which might give you a bit more coherence.

Q122 Baroness Hussein-Ece: We have already touched on the question that I am going to ask you, which is about the role of central government. What role does central government play in reducing barriers to opportunity and promoting social mobility? I know you have touched on the education system feeding into an industrial strategy. Kate, you talked about how the mandatory reporting of socioeconomic backgrounds could drive change. That was part of the question, but there is also a supplementary bit to it. What role, if any, should trade unions play in the Government’s attempts to do this?

Kate Bell: One thing that we have not mentioned, which I think should be a fundamental role of any Government, is tackling child poverty. If children grow up poor, we know their opportunities are limited throughout their life. There is a huge range of evidence that demonstrates that.

Trade unions are united, on behalf of our members and for a fairer society, in seeing tackling child poverty as part of central government’s role in ensuring that everyone has a fair chance, which is what the committee is looking at. That is probably what I personally would put at the top of the list, other than the issues that we have already mentioned on the panel today.

The Chair: Are there other gaps that we have not covered?

Jon Richards: Housing is a big issue, is it not? Where you have problems with housing in particular areas, it builds that child poverty gap. Having a coherent housing strategy is a really important part of doing that because it provides stability.

There is a primary school not far from me in Peckham where last year 50% of the primary school children were living in unstable accommodation. You cannot improve your environment; you cannot educate people when they do not know where they are going to be living in the long term. That is a real fundamental, which works hand in hand with child poverty.

Andy Murray: Can I just mention one other thing that we have not mentioned? You are talking about getting people engaged back in the economy. A core issue is going to be childcare. One reason people might not be economically active is that they cannot because of family commitments and childcare. Support for childcare, paternity rights, paternity pay and that type of thing are key elements that the Government need to review.

Andy Case: A core role of government is determining where to spend public funds, where to spend public resources. The economy is in the state that it is in at any given time, but the point that we would strongly make is that, whatever bucket of resources we have, in 2010 we were spending over 5% of our GDP on education. It is now 3.9% of our GDP. It is about choices, ultimately. You are going to get out what you put in.

Q123 Lord Watts: You talked about the Government being able to change things by investing in certain areas. We had David Willetts here last week. David was saying that the presence of a university increases social mobility. If you have a university close to you, that happens. You are not able to build a university in every deprived area, but the Government are committed to moving civil servants out of London and into the regions. When Governments have done that in the past, they have tended to go to Liverpool, Manchester or Edinburgh; they do not go to Barnsley or Wigan. It seems to me that that would be a good driving point. What are your views on that?

Kate Bell: The Government have just announced that they are going to move more civil servants out of London. Our Civil Service unions have said they want to work with them on that plan. They have not said where yet. That is why I am pausing.

The Chair: Your members will have a view.

Jon Richards: They mentioned Glasgow.

The Chair: Newcastle.

Jon Richards: Yes. That is it. They tend to build them into structures because you have—

Lord Watts: They are big cities. The point that I am trying to make is that most big cities are economically viable now to a greater extent. It is the outlying areas that tend to have the social deprivation. I just wondered whether moving them to areas other than the major cities would be a positive thing for social mobility.

Jon Richards: There was an experiment in moving the ONS to Newport. There have been some problems in attracting people to go to Newport. I have another brother who used to live in Newport, so I have to be careful what I say about that.

This goes back to what you were saying about the ability to attract professionals into areas. If you want to have a skilled workforce, skilled workforces coagulate and work together. I am not dissing towns, but, if you have a good group of people together, that builds the infrastructure of pubs, nightlife and other professions. You have to have a certain number of people. You have to have the infrastructure to build it. You have to build infrastructure at the same time as attracting people rather than putting people—

The Chair: I am sorry. I am conscious of your time. We have reached the end of time. If you can allow us a little bit longer, Lord Evans is bursting to ask a question on this subject and then Lord Harlech is going to ask our final question.

Lord Evans of Rainow: To David’s question, back in the day I worked with the PCS union because the Department for Education was closing down the Department for Education building in Runcorn. Hundreds of jobs were going from my constituency. They wanted to put them in Manchester Piccadilly, in the town centre.

David Willetts talked about the importance of transportation for students. In London, you can live all over this part of the world and you can get a tram, a train and so on and so forth. You can get around. That is not the case in most other cities within the United Kingdom. If the Civil Service or a government organisation does relocate into a place, it can cause problems.

Lord Willetts mentioned the importance of public transport. For this committee, that is one of the most important parts. Transport enables people. My noble friend talked about Wigan, but Wigan could be gentrified because you could work in Manchester—

The Chair: We want it to be.

Lord Evans of Rainow: If you have good public transport, people will move to towns that are deprived, but they are not doing that. People move to the area and work in good and well-paid jobs, which we all want, in the town centre, but they live outside of the town centre. That is the point that I am making.

Kate Bell: It is about transport and housing.

Lord Evans of Rainow: Yes, transport and housing. That is the point I am making.

Q124 Lord Harlech: Thank you for your evidence this morning. What would be your top two practical—you can take “practical” to imply low-cost—recommendations that we could make to government to reduce barriers to opportunity and improve social mobility? As a caveat to that, if your recommendation has a cost, what would you cut to pay for it? So often we hear solutions and recommendations that are going to take bigger spending, but we never hear what should be cut in its place.

Kate Bell: I will kick off. I am going to slightly reject the premise of your question for my first answer. You have to invest in tackling child poverty. Without doing that, your other recommendations will make very little difference. If you need to raise money, there are taxes that could go up. We have talked about, for example, further taxes. Capital gains tax is one recommendation that we have made. I do not think you have to accept the premise of cuts. There are different ways that you could raise money to fund that investment.

The second one, which is lower cost, would be to restore the Union Learning Fund. I will get the figure wrong, but the investment was less than £20 million. It was a very low-cost investment from a government point of view, which had very tangible outcomes in terms of getting people back into learning at a later stage in their career. That is something very concrete that you could recommend.

Jon Richards: I was going to mention the Union Learning Fund as well. From our perspective, it gives us the opportunity to build structures that will build learning and will allow people to get out of poverty and low pay.

As I said at the start, Gordon Brown said that poverty used to be about unemployment but it is now about low pay. If we can train people, build them and develop their careers, that is a really good investment. It has been shown to reap rewards. You get more back from investment in training up a load of union reps.

Of course, housing is the fundamental thing. Stable housing is very important. We need to address child poverty and housing.

The Chair: Mr Case and Mr Murray, while you are answering, do flag up anything else that we have not touched on.

Andy Case: Specifically within the education system, I completely agree about child poverty. That has to be a priority. I agree with my colleague there. To my point earlier, it is not necessarily about cost; it is about your overall bucket of resources. As for whether you spend more on education or other public services, that is government’s role. We would suggest that there are other ways that you could look to change spending.

Those two points aside, if I think about the specific practical things within the education system that would make a difference, we highlighted the point earlier about ensuring that applied general qualifications remain. There is no cost really associated to that. That is a really specific one that helps loads of students into employment and higher education.

To be really specific within education, something that would be low cost would be changing the fundamental system for how schools are measured and judged to one that is focused on improvement rather than judgments and labels, as we have currently with performance tables and Ofsted judgments. I could go on for a long time about that. There is no cost associated with changing the model.

The Chair: We do not want to stop you because it is very interesting.

Jon Richards: Can I suggest some ways of addressing housing? Rightly, the Government are looking at using pension funds to fund housing. I am vice-chair of the Local Government Pension Scheme. They are looking at using the funding in the Local Government Pension Scheme directly to fund housing. That is not low cost. It is a growth issue. There is some real work that is starting to be done there.

Andy Murray: I would add two very brief points. I have already mentioned one of them. I will mention both. First is building back a national youth service.

The Chair: I think your second one is the national industrial strategy, but I may not have been paying full attention.

Andy Murray: That is definitely there. Yes, we need a national industrial strategy, but not just that. We need a consistent long-term national industrial strategy that is not going to be changed every five years. That probably needs a cross-party approach. I have to say that to you.

The other thing I would say—I will come back to it—is that further education is key to social mobility. It is key to engaging those groups in our society who are currently economically inactive. Going back to my earlier point, first, give further education a clear role. What is it about? What do you want out of it? Secondly—this bit will be controversial, but I am going to say it—give control of further education back to local authorities.

The Chair: On behalf of the committee, we are really grateful for your time. You have spent quite a good part of your morning helping us. I hope we will come up with some constructive recommendations, some of which you may approve of and some of which the Government may pay attention to.