That this House has considered social mobility and Treasury reform.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I called this debate because I passionately believe that this country’s most powerful and most important resource is its people, and it is simply unacceptable that in the 21st century we still do not have equality of opportunity for people in Britain.
I am someone who knows what it is like not to have all the opportunities you want on the doorstep and not to be connected to those opportunities. I came into politics to get change on the ground for people, not just to debate what needs to happen. That is why about a year ago, with the Harrison Centre for Social Mobility, I established the social mobility pledge—to get action on the ground, working with businesses.
Hundreds of businesses have now stepped up to the plate to provide more opportunity for more young people, by getting into schools and helping to raise aspiration, talking about careers, allowing young people to come into the workplace to get work experience or apprenticeships and, crucially, looking at recruitment practices. Those companies are making sure that their approach on recruitment means they are open to all the talent out there. Hundreds of companies are involved. Already, social mobility pledge companies collectively employ more than 2.5 million people.
That work has taken me all over the country, from Sunderland to Hull, from Bradford to Manchester. With those companies and organisations, we are a coalition of the willing. We are finding out what works on the ground and are then spreading that insight and knowledge further and faster and creating a race to the top. The social mobility pledge is doing practical work to get more opportunity to millions of young people. I thank the businesses and organisations that are part of it, and part of this push.
This is a debate about social mobility and, of course, I noticed the announcement from the great leader, Jeremy Corbyn, at the weekend, ditching improving social mobility. I am sure the shadow Minister will want to respond on that, but clearly social mobility is just a distraction from the class war that Corbyn’s Labour party is engaged in.
Of course. The right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) has the sense, I think, that aspiration is a dirty word and is therefore not something that other people should feel is a good thing. That is wrong.
I was going to wait until my contribution to respond to the right hon. Lady, but it is quite clear that that is not the policy of the Labour party or of my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). We want as many people as possible to do well, not just a chosen few in a grammar-school society of the type the right hon. Lady proposes.
I thought the hon. Lady would probably say that. Unfortunately, that illustrates that the Opposition have not understood what social mobility means. It means equality of opportunity. It would probably be better—this is why I raised the point—if we stopped arguing about semantics and started talking about finding common ground on how to get change for the better for millions of young people and communities currently disconnected from opportunity or too far from it. If this just becomes a debate on semantics, which is what I worry the right hon. Member for Islington North is trying to turn it into, we will not get anywhere fast. I will come on to why that is a problem, but the topic of this debate is that, while there are broader problems around how we debate achieving social mobility, which is why it has not happened, there is a bigger problem, which is about how the Government approach social mobility and the Treasury’s place within that.
Let us be absolutely clear: achieving social mobility means we achieve equality of opportunity for everyone in our country, irrespective of where they start, who they are and what their background is. It is not—I repeat, not—just about the gifted few.
I want to see system change. I have talked about the practical work I am doing on the ground with businesses and organisations through the social mobility pledge, outside of the Government, but if we are to finally crack the nut—unlike the Labour party, I do not believe we should give up trying to achieve social mobility—we have to ensure change inside the Government. To my mind, that starts with the Treasury, and that is why I called this debate.
After eight years in government, overwhelmingly as a Cabinet Minister and running three different Departments, my conclusion is that we effectively need to abolish the Treasury in its current form. What we have right now is dysfunctional and not fit for purpose. It does not achieve the transformation in opportunity and social mobility that Britain needs.
I congratulate the right hon. Lady on securing this debate. She has a long interest in the topic. She referred to the abolition of the Treasury. Has she indicated that to the 10 Conservative hopefuls for Prime Minister?
I will set out my wider strategy on why I think the Treasury in its current form is not fit for purpose. I hope in holding the debate that some of the arguments will get cut-through. If we are here to improve lives, for young people in particular, and to connect those young people to opportunity, things have to radically change, including in government. We need fundamental change in how the Government look at and invest taxpayers’ money, and that means the Treasury.
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing this debate and on her work on social mobility over many years. I think, like me, she was comprehensively educated—like many on the Conservative Benches—and joined the Conservative party precisely because we are the party of opportunity and aspiration. On the point raised by the hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell), does she agree that we need to put pressure on the Conservative candidates to make sure that investment in education, which is a key enabler of social mobility, is a hot topic and something that every single one of them should have as a top priority should they become leader?
I agree. I am setting out how to fix the underlying problem of why we are underinvesting in people in our country and their potential. That starts with the Treasury. In my view, the Treasury has a twofold problem—first, how it operates across Government and, secondly, its policy approach.
On how it operates, it starts going wrong with the Treasury—UK plc’s finance department—having its own separate strategy from the Prime Minister, the chief executive. We have seen this down the years. It is traditional to see Chancellors at loggerheads with their Prime Ministers. We would never see a finance director able to countermand the CEO and undermine their strategy in any other organisation, yet that is exactly what we see, year to year and day to day. It has happened under Governments of every colour with the Treasury, as it is currently set up. Time and again, we end up with a Prime Minister, who is meant to be running the country, with one strategy, and a Chancellor with a different one, and both at loggerheads and going nowhere fast. It is no wonder that Prime Ministers do not get to deliver their strategies when the finance Department has an entirely separate one.
Parliament has a Budget speech every single year; it is essentially the Government’s strategy statement to Parliament and MPs for the year. It is not, however, the Prime Minister who delivers the strategy statement; it is the Chancellor. That does not make sense at all. Of course, these Budget statements are traditionally packed with politically driven, willy-waving, “look-at-me” projects for the Chancellor. Most are not even Treasury ideas. The best ideas are hoovered up from every other Secretary of State running Departments across Government, and they are generally not even the Treasury’s. Worst of all, most of these excellent policy announcements—for example, the one that we made a couple of years ago on vocational education and T-levels—are held up in order to wait for the Chancellor to announce them in a Budget statement. That is entirely dysfunctional, and it has to stop.
The right hon. Lady is making a compelling point on longer budgets. Does she agree that short-term budgets cause huge uncertainty for the responsibilities of devolved Administrations, who rely on knowing when the Budget will come and what the spending will be?
Indeed I do. Of course, not being able to plan ahead is a hugely inefficient way to manage resources. We spend efficiently when we can get long-term deals from suppliers and contractors, and when we can plan into the future. The inability of any of us to do this is absolutely an inefficient, sub-optimal way to manage finances. If we were to have the spending review, it would be a three-year spending review, but even a three-year or five-year spending review is not long term for a country. The companies that I spent 15 years working in did three-year to five-year spending reviews, but they were not Britain, which needs to invest for the long term.
How on earth are we going to invest long term in people and unlock social mobility if we will not even look beyond the next two or three years? If we will not even look beyond the next 12 months, it is absolutely impossible. This is a failing strategy, and a functioning department or ministry of finance should know that. The fact that the Treasury does not know that tells us everything about why it is not fit for purpose and should, as it stands today, be abolished.
The way in which that failing extends, operates and works on policy in practice—I speak as a former Secretary of State who ran three spending Departments—is that unless a departmental policy area is demonstrably and critically failing on the ground, the Treasury’s attitude is to turn a blind eye and hope that it all gets better. The Treasury’s technical explanation for this is that it hopes that that will drive efficiencies; that the system will have to work harder and deliver the same for less money. That might be true in some cases, but we are set up to fail because the Treasury has no way of understanding when that point has been long passed, and we do not have enough resources to deliver the Government’s plan—possibly the Prime Minister’s plan, but often it is the Chancellor’s plan.
My right hon. Friend is being very generous in giving way. Does she agree that enabling young people to reach their full potential is a core responsibility not only of the Treasury but of the Government? I suspect it is one of the key reasons why we got into politics in the first place. Will she join me in appealing to the Prime Minister, before she leaves office, to make a strategic and big move on education and education funding, which would ensure that the future leader, whoever it is, is obliged to deliver incremental, significant increases in funding for education in order to deliver on the key promise that she made when she first entered Downing Street three years ago?
If the Conservative party is to be taken seriously as the party of opportunity, it is important that it has a clear, articulated and well-funded strategy on developing our nation’s talents, and of course that means investment in schools. One of the problems is that, because the Treasury does not have an approach on valuing human capital, it does not understand how to look at valuing investment in schools alongside investment in physical capital. It does not have any sense of how to invest in human capital, which is perhaps the most powerful form of capital, but it is all over how to value the long-term returns on physical capital infrastructure projects, such as High Speed 2. The reality is that it is the capacity and talent of the people who get on those trains, log on to the broadband, get on the tube—like my constituents—or get into the cars that go on those roads that will determine whether Britain is successful in the future.
A functioning Treasury would understand that that is how to maximise long-term tax receipts and the effectiveness of public investment, because of course improving lives is the best way to take the pressure off public spend, so much of which is invested in lives that have gone wrong. Instead, the Treasury effectively just manages cash flow year to year—I am a chartered accountant with 15 years of experience in business, so I am as qualified as anyone to comment on this. We see reports saying that tax receipts and growth have been a bit better, so the Chancellor has a bit more money in his pocket. That is cash flow management, not managing the nation’s books for the long term. It is the polar opposite of a long-term strategy.
The fiscal rules should be scrapped and reworked on the basis of debt and deficit, how we deliver and measure long-term value and whether policy measures are creating or destroying it. In Cabinet, I regularly pointed out to the Chancellor the Treasury’s inadequate approach to valuing investment in people. An example of that is that we spend literally hundreds of thousands of pounds on the children and young people who end up in alternative provision and out of mainstream school. About 6% of them come out of alternative provision with a credible, strong or standard score in GCSE maths and English. That is no sort of strategy. A functioning Treasury would insist that it be reworked to deliver not only better lives but a smarter approach to spending. Those are some of the most challenging and vulnerable young people in our country, and they are often dealt with by children’s services. Those are the kids who have had the toughest starts and often face the bleakest futures. There is an opportunity cost to them in the failure that lies ahead of them in their lives if we do not help them get on track, and to the public finances, too. I have met lots of those young people. I have been up to the Beacon of Light—a fantastic place in Sunderland that helps young people to get on track and works with local businesses to slot them into careers. It turns their lives around and gets them on track. That is transformational not just for them but for Britain’s long-term public finances. Those young people generate more tax, which contributes to our economy and our society. The spend on welfare, the justice system and health due to continued family breakdown is less.
I thank the right hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening) for securing this debate and for setting the scene so well. It is always a pleasure to speak on matters of such importance, and I support and sympathise with her remarks. I am pleased to see that the Democratic Unionist party is the second-largest party represented in the Chamber today, just slightly behind the Conservative party numerically.
I thank the right hon. Lady for her hard work on this issue and for the work she did as a Minister. I completely agree with her assessment of the Augar review, and I enjoyed reading her piece in the Financial Times earlier this month on that very topic—it was helpful for a better understanding of the debate, for which I thank her. Something that jumped off the screen was this:
“Its figures show that graduates going on to earn the highest salaries among their peers will see their overall repayments reduced by £18k—a third compared with now. However, for lower to middle-earner graduates, it is the opposite—Augar raises their overall repayments by £12k, almost double.”
I sincerely believe that that reinforces the view that the rich get richer at the expense of the lower class, who become stuck in a mire, as the right hon. Lady mentioned. We should also put on the record our thanks to the Library for providing a briefing pack with information and examples of the issue to help us.
It is important to look at the different opportunities for social mobility for women compared with those for men. There have been changes, which we must recognise, but later I will give an example and tell the story of a constituent who I think exemplifies the issue from a gender point of view. We must also address the fact that ethnic groups have experienced differing life chances over time. In her concluding remarks, the right hon. Lady referred to the need to give everyone the opportunity to maximise their potential, and I want to see that as well. There is also the issue of social mobility opportunities across the country in business and industry.
Does my hon. Friend agree that part of what we need to do is to further incentivise people, particularly young people, through the tax system, so that they can save? Personal allowances, for example, have risen in recent years, but we also need a rise in the national insurance threshold, so that people—particularly young people and those in part-time employment—can earn a higher net income, then work through the system with greater training and skills, and enter a higher earnings bracket.
My hon. Friend and colleague so often brings to debates an overarching view of where we and young people in our constituencies and across the whole of the United Kingdom need to be.
I will give an example that came my way only last week—although I know the young lady concerned—while I was researching for this debate. She has four children, works in retail, and her husband works in manual labour. Both are on low incomes and receive tax credits to supplement their income. Tax credits have been a great boost for many people. They are okay as long as they are going all right, but whenever they go wrong—if there is an overpayment, for example—they become a real noose around recipients’ necks. When done right, they are a bonus.
The young lady’s eldest child suffered a traumatic brain injury a number of years ago—he survived, thank God, although his life is altered as a result. The reason she came to my staff was to ask for help understanding the benefits system. Probably for all MPs, including the Minister, the most important issue in our constituency office is benefits—it outstrips by far all other requests to our office.
My constituent had decided that she would like to go back to college to get the qualifications necessary for her to enter higher education, with the goal of being an intensive care unit nurse providing the assistance for which she was so grateful in her life. That lady is everything that we might associate with the job: caring, compassionate, intelligent and dedicated. I believe that nursing is a calling, and she certainly has it. She just needs the opportunity—the social mobility for the human capital referred to earlier, to get the opportunity to advance herself and to do well.
In order to answer that call, however, my constituent needs to have her children minded. Her parents have passed on and her in-laws are both still working full-time. She gets tax credit for the few days that she works to help. That would all change if she became a student to provide a better life for her family. This young lady wanted to do better, but found herself in a system that almost holds her back, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) was saying. What the right hon. Member for Putney said in her introduction is therefore exactly the issue that we have to address.
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We should abolish the Budget statement in its current form, as delivered by the Chancellor. By all means, let us downgrade it and have it as a very important, but functional, annual presentation of the nation’s finances. Why do we not replace it with a Queen’s Speech update? This could be a proper strategy speech for Parliament every year, delivered by the Prime Minister. There is no reason why a Queen’s Speech update—a strategy speech—could not introduce a Finance Bill. I have listened to enough Chancellors effectively introduce other Departments’ Bills on social care and all sorts of things over the years. There is no reason why a Prime Minister giving an annual update on the Queen’s Speech progress could not set out the key terms of a Finance Bill. The Chancellor could fill in the details later.
I will move on to the spending review, which is also a hugely dysfunctional process—that is assuming it happens, which I will come to in a second. The spending review is essentially a strategy process for the Government, yet it is not led by No. 10 and the Prime Minister; it is led by the Chancellor and a finance Department that potentially micro-manages a wholly separate strategy from that of the Prime Minister of this country. Through this process, the Treasury has other Departments totally over a barrel. I think there would be less of a problem with how spending reviews are approached if the Treasury actually approached them effectively, but it does not. Right now, the UK has budgets set to 2020, which is next year. The country has no budgets in place for any of its spend after next year, which is wholly unacceptable.
Look at how this plays out on the ground. Last week I was up in Bradford to meet the opportunity area team, who are doing some absolutely fantastic work on the ground by connecting improvements in schools, businesses, the local authority and communities. This is a long-term—probably a decade-long—project to get structural change in a community that has bags of potential but needs its schools to do better and its businesses to connect with and develop the talent coming out of those schools. However, the team does not even have a budget after next year. How can we expect to get long-term change in our country, if budgets do not even extend beyond the next 12 months? It is entirely disconnected from the real world of how change happens on the ground. I have talked about opportunity areas, but it is writ large across virtually every single Government-delivered project that is happening on the ground to change things and improve lives.
The Treasury has just cancelled the spending review. From what I read in the papers, we will simply be rolling budgets forwards. At such a crucial time, I cannot think of a less strategic way to manage the UK’s public finances and invest in the future.
Problems are not fixed early and are simply left. By the time the Treasury finally understands that it is a crisis, it is more expensive to fix it. Alongside a total lack of long-term planning, the Treasury does not fix problems early, which is hugely expensive. Departments’ spending—be it on prisons, schools, healthcare, local government or children’s and adults’ services—ends up in crisis, needing last-minute funding. That is a hugely expensive way to run the nation’s finances. Most importantly, it leads to real hardship on the ground, which is the exact opposite of what Governments of all colours try to achieve.
In my area of education, it was blindingly clear in early 2017 that, although the schools funding formula was broadly the right approach—levelling up schools that had traditionally been underfunded—more money needed to go through the formula, and the money should have come from the Treasury. That was clear to me from talking to colleagues and MPs in the House, and from talking and listening to teachers and parents, yet it was only after the election that we could take any action on that obvious problem. In fact, as everyone knows, I ended up doing my own mini-budget to release £1.3 billion to put into frontline funding. One might have expected that the Treasury would welcome a Secretary of State doing its job for it, but I had to haggle to get that agreement through the Treasury and be able to announce it. I fear that the Treasury yet again is making a similar mistake on school funding and repeating the process.
Reviews are another classic Treasury ruse. The recent Augar review managed to waste well over a year coming up with obvious conclusions about additional funding for further education, but no doubt the Treasury is delighted that it can kick the issue into the long grass for another 12 to 18 months. However, if the substance of the point is that FE needs additional funding, the Treasury has not done young people in the FE system any favours by turning its face away from the need to fund the system properly. It simply cannot be allowed to continue operating in this way.
I have talked about my experience of how the Treasury interacts with other Departments, but what about its policies? It should be managing the nation’s finances to maximise long-term value by unlocking the potential of its most crucial, precious resource—its people. It should set taxation and public investment policy to deliver that strategy for the long term. That is how to reduce the deficit sustainably. It needs to be a finance Department with policies to tackle weak access to opportunity.
For example, how do we recapitalise a generation of young people who do not have access to capital and therefore are not only disconnected from the fact that Britain is a capitalist society but cannot access opportunity? The Government and Parliament decided that they are willing to give young people access to capital if they want one kind of opportunity—a degree—but other opportunities are a wholly different matter. If young people want resources to move across the country to get the apprenticeship opportunity that they really want, to start a business, to put down a deposit on a house, or to rent a place somewhere where they can get on with their career, we do not capitalise them to do that. We should be doing that, and a functioning Treasury would look at those sorts of strategic measures to unlock a structural change in access to opportunity and social mobility in our country.
My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Worcestershire (Nigel Huddleston) asked a good question about the leadership candidates. At the moment, we are hearing only simple, tactical taxation suggestions that, frankly, would not strategically or structurally shift the dial on social mobility.
As Secretary of State for Education, I had those discussions regularly with the Chancellor, the Chief Secretary and the Treasury. A Treasury sensibly managing public finances for the long-term would run towards a business case that would improve those lives, but it was like pulling teeth. If the Treasury continues to see spending on health, education and prisons only as a cost, it will always try to minimise it. Instead, it should see that spending as an investment that generates a return. Changing the way the Treasury works so that it looks at early intervention and fixing problems before they become bigger would deliver long-term, sustainable and optimised public finances.
The Treasury’s strategy on taxation and spending should be looked at through a very simple lens—does it deliver improved social mobility in our country or not? Every policy should have a clear test: does it level the playing field on opportunity in the short and long terms? If the answer is no, the Treasury ought to ask whether and why it is wise to put taxpayer money against that project.
I know that the Treasury has under way some Office for National Statistics work on valuing human capital—I am pleased about that—but it is about how that capital is accounted for, and I am afraid that the work just scratches the surface of the issues that I have raised. I am talking about far more than the ONS project. I am talking about a Treasury that, in its present form, is clearly incapable of doing the job that it needs to do to manage Britain’s public finances, unlock social mobility and, dare I say, reform itself, which it will not do to itself.
We should consider breaking up the Treasury, perhaps splitting it into a Ministry of Finance and an Economics Ministry, while merging the former with some elements of the Cabinet Office and having it report properly to the Prime Minister, so that it genuinely delivers a Prime Minister’s strategy for our country. This morning, I have not had much time to do anything more than scratch the surface, but if we really want Britain to be the first country to achieve equality of opportunity, a significant part of that solution starts right at the heart of Government, by fixing the dysfunctional Treasury.
Unless we grasp that nettle, we should not be surprised to get the same day-to-day cash flow management that prioritises political pet projects, sets No. 10 and No. 11 at loggerheads with each other, which is dysfunctional for the nation, and, in the end, achieves the exact opposite of what we all want—for our children, young people and communities to have equality of opportunity, access to opportunity on their doorstep and the chance to be the best version of themselves. That unlocks the chance for our country to be the best version of Britain, too.
I am not here to play party politics—that is not my job in this place or what I am about—but it is only fair and right to recognise that Tony Blair’s Labour Government committed themselves to social mobility. At that time—before my time in the House—Blair also committed himself to addressing the issue of poverty, because social mobility and poverty were interlinked. To be fair, it is only right to recognise those commitments. The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition Government also had a clear strategy to improve social mobility. The then Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, said, “fairness means social mobility.” Clearly, he looked at that too.
The right hon. Lady referred at some length to human capital—it is important to put that on record—which I think is the crux of the matter. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development defines human capital as the
“knowledge, skills, competencies and attributes embodied in individuals that facilitate the creation of personal, social and economic well-being”.
Clearly, we should never underestimate human capital if we want it to arrive at where its potential allows. In an October 2018 release, the ONS indicated that the total stock of human capital in the UK in real terms was worth £20.4 trillion in 2017, slightly down from £20.6 trillion the year before. It is good to recognise human capital.
Earlier, I mentioned a young lady in my constituency who I believe would fit into this category. She is an example of someone who, through social mobility, tried to advance her status and position in life, and succeeded. It is important to mention someone who achieved her potential when the regime was perhaps not set up to let her do so.
“Treasury reform” is included in the title of the debate, and clearly the Treasury has to take the issues on board—giving people opportunity and the chance to do better. My constituent, however, would have her tax credits cut if she was on a course, which she would therefore be unable to afford. That was her predicament. The system as designed does not allow for change, but ties us to where we are. Knowing the young lady as we do, she is a loss to the medical profession. If she wanted to claim housing benefit to offset the loss of tax credits, she would have to go on universal credit, and she simply could not afford the five-week lead-in because she has four children and rent to pay.
My constituent is stuck, and my fear is that the Augar review does not help people like that—the right hon. Member for Putney referred to that in her introduction, I refer to it now and others who speak afterwards will no doubt do the same. Such examples perpetuate the idea that university is only for the young and for the middle and upper classes, and that those who are called to do different things with their life cannot do it all. That frustrates me and, for the record, I would like to see the change proposed by the right hon. Lady, because it would be helpful.
My staff have made inquiries about the help available to get my constituent to the stage at which she can go into nursing with the bursary that being a student nurse brings. As for making education accessible to working-class people, however, we clearly have not achieved that. We sincerely need to work harder to do that. That is why I am supportive of my colleague, the right hon. Lady, and her desire to ensure that those in need of help and support to reach their goals can get it, regardless of the social structure into which they were born.
This debate is about giving opportunity and about ensuring that those who need help can achieve it. At the present time, our system does not help such people in the way that it should. The days of education only for the privileged are, and should be, a thing of the past, and the days of further education only for the young or privileged also need to be a thing of the past. This Government and the Minister must understand where people are coming from and help them to get to where they need to be.
My mum and dad sent me to boarding school. I know, honestly, that that was a big step for them to take. Those five years when I was in boarding school meant that my working-class family had to keep the same car for years, had no holidays, and so on. I am therefore deeply indebted to my parents for giving me that educational opportunity. They worked, scrimped and saved to make it happen. What I want to see in the society I live in and represent is everyone having the same opportunity. I do not see that now, unfortunately. That is why this debate is so important—I thank the right hon. Lady for securing it and for airing the issues so well today. By doing so, she has done a favour and sought justice for people across all of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, where opportunity and equality should be there for all.