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Revised Draft
How to help our left-behind communities and citizens
Introduction
The outcome of the referendum on June 23rd last year gave many sorts of answers to an unavoidably simple question. Many of those who voted to leave the EU opposed the compromises of British sovereignty that membership involved, the free movement that enabled workers from the rest of the EU to take up jobs in Britain, and the costs of membership, and believed the promise that exit would provide extra money for public services within the UK. But many voted as much against London as against Brussels, against the speed of economic and social change, against the decline of industrial employment and the neglect of the towns that had depended on those industries. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation summarised the findings of a number of studies in concluding that ‘Groups in Britain who have been “left behind” by rapid economic change and feel cut adrift from the mainstream consensus were the most likely to support Brexit.’
Leaving the European Union will not provide a remedy for the discontents of these marginalised communities. It will make their situation worse, as European markets become less open to the UK and shrinking governmentrevenues force further spending cuts. The economic agenda of the Leave campaign, committed to low taxation, a smaller state and – for some – unilateral free trade – would leave these communities poorer than before. These are British citizens, who feel abandoned by the loss of steady employment,by low pay and cuts to in-work benefits, by privatization, by the reduction of local public services, by the lack of opportunities for their children. Lord Ashcroft’s analysis of voting in the referendum highlighted that the large majority of those who were optimistic about the future voted ‘Remain’; those who were pessimistic, about their own prospects and about the country’s, voted to leave. The Leave vote was strongest in areas where the economy had not yet recovered to pre-2008 levels.
Whatever the outcome of the Conservative government’s Brexit negotiations, and whatever damage that inflicts on our economy and on tax revenues,any progressive party must do its best to use the power of central and of local government to offer these communities hope and help again. This paper sets out Liberal Democrat proposals to strengthen local communities, to improve education outcomes forthe children of those who live in them from nursery to adulthood, to raise the quality and security of local housing, to help to regenerate local enterprise and employment, and to return a sense of engagement and citizenship within our wider national community.
Justified grievances, understandable insecurities, exploited fears
Turnout in the EU Referendum was notably higher than in recent general elections, let alone in local elections. The disenchanted and disconnected came out to express their accumulated sense of abandonment by political parties, by central government and by perceivedmetropolitan elites. The patchwork of economic success and failure, across England, was reflected in the distribution of votes. Prosperous cities like Manchester and Leeds returned majorities for Remain, although in former council estates not far from their city centres there was strong support for Leave. Smaller and subsidiary former industrial towns grouped around these cities voted much more strongly for Brexit; and so did towns in otherwise prosperous rural areas, where employment opportunities are limited and local companies have shrunk. The most detailed analysis of voting, published by BBC News in January 2017, showed a strongly working-class, former council house ward in Middlesborough as having returned the highest percentage vote to leave the EU (at 82.5%), but also noted wards in Wisbech, Skegness and Canvey Island as returning majorities above 80%.
Issues of identity, of lost community and of insecurity were reported as at least as important as economic interest. But identity, educational achievement and economic position overlapped. Most of those not working, Lord Ashcroft’s analysis noted, voted to leave; they felt deprived of the benefits of economic change, threatened by the declining dignity and value of male labour, shut out of a society that now placeda higher value on skills and education. Old-established working class communities, where regular employment in mills and factories has given way to short-term jobs in services and supermarkets, and where what had been a stable community has been disrupted by privatization and short-term lets by multiple landlords, feelresentful that they have not shared in the prosperity that London, the south-east and the prosperous centres of English cities have enjoyed.
Cultural resentment has been increased by the frequency with which – as they see it – the metropolitan media have portrayed them as an undeserving under-class, living on benefits and refusing to work. ’They feel patronised, slandered and mistrusted’, a Spectator columnist wrote after the June 2016 referendum. TV programmes like ‘Benefits Street’ were seen as demonising the unskilled and unemployed, rather than analysing and addressing the disadvantages they face. Portrayal by right-wing thinkers of these communities as the undeserving poor, an indolent underclass who are not ‘merely poor, but often at the margins of society, unsocialised and violent’ (in the words of Charles Murray and Melanie Phillips)has given intellectual backing to such denigration. We face a dispossessed working class, mistrustful of metropolitan journalists as well as metropolitan politicians.
Perception, as well as reality, is vital in democratic politics. Many of the communities which voted most strongly for Brexit had fewer recent immigrants than the rest of England, yet cited fear of immigration as a strong motivation for their vote. Some, including towns in East Anglia and the East Midlands, had experienced a recent surge of immigration from continental Europe, with consequent strains on schools, the NHSand housing. Others saw shortages of social housing and cuts in social services as evidence of local authorities favouring immigrants, when the root causes were long-term changes in policy and cuts in funding. A Financial Times survey of a working class suburb of Southampton, in October 2016, noted that ‘it is easy to blame immigration for the UK’s palpably deteriorating public services’ when the reality is that less is available for all. In Southampton and elsewhere, the perception that migrants are allowed to jump the queue for social housing is spread by the actions of private landlords who have bought up former council houses sold to sitting tenants in order to rent them out to migrant workers. ‘The idea that council homes are going to immigrants is a myth’, the local Conservative MP is quoted as saying.
Myths are however powerful in politics, especially when supported by the right-wing media and UKIP. Migrant families with small children have added to pressures on nurseries, GP surgeriesand schools. But the narrative cultivated by right-wing media that the deterioration of the health service is due to health tourism and migrant demands is a convenient populist distraction; the NHS is under-funded, and struggles to cope with elderly British far more than young and fit migrants. Welfare benefits have been cut for all, not transferred to new arrivals while native English lost out.
Direct recruitment of workers from continental Europe, in construction, hospitality, warehousing, long-distance truck driving, even nursing, may berational for UK private and public employers: cheaper to bring in already-trained and motivated workers than to invest in training local labour. UK employers protest that advertisements for local labour do not attract qualified or keen applicants. Nevertheless, the perception by native English is that immigrants are taking their jobs, when the reality is that the English schools system and its weakness in skills training and preparation for work have left them at a structural disadvantage in the labour market.
The perception that government has abandoned these communities, that London and the south-eastare flourishing while cities and towns elsewhere are squeezed, is however rooted in uncomfortable reality. England has become the most centralised country in the industrialised democratic world over the past 30-40 years, as local government has shrunk and Whitehall has taken over more and more previously municipal responsibilities. Restructuring of local authorities, including mergers to form larger authorities, have increased the distance between voters and local representatives. Labour, which represented many of these ‘heartlands’ of industrial and working class England, has too often widened the gap by taking their voters for granted, and by parachuting candidates from London into industrial seats. Since the financial crisis of 2008-9, local authorities across England have suffered cuts of 30-40% in the government’s contribution to their spendingcapabilities (during the coalition, with reluctant Liberal Democrat acquiescence), shrinking their ability to provide basic services to their localcommunities. Government seems distant, and hostile, to people in deprived communities: imposing penalties on working benefits or housing support, but otherwise more and more absent – from child care to social care for the aged. Schools in such areas suffer from high teacher turnover as well as frozen budgets; hospitals and GP surgeries are overloaded, in partwith the mental health problems of the depressed and long-term unemployed. Central government’s closure of government offices in the English regions has exacerbated the lack of understanding of the impact of government policies on the poorer parts of the country.
It’s also anuncomfortable reality that low-skilled people in former industrial towns and villages, and also in small towns outside metropolitan regions, have not benefitted from economic growth in an increasingly globalised economy. They read of sharp rises in executive pay, of affluent educated metropolitans, while their experience is of short-term employment in insecure and low-paid jobs. Hardly surprisingly, they feel that they have lost out. Social mobility in the UK is lower than in almost all other countries within the OECD, with the exception of the USA. Those who are born at the bottom stay at the bottom. Their counterparts in the USA blame foreign companies and governments, and support protection; in Britain, they blame the EU, and support withdrawal.
Liberal Democrats cannot – and should not – simply respond to the fears and insecurities of these communities on their own terms, as many Labour politicians have suggested. But we can, and should, deal with their justified grievances, and the failures of our state and society to assist them in coping with the problems of economic, social and generational change. The rest of this paper sets out a strategy for reengaging England’s dispossessed underclass in our national community: through targeted investment, through better provision of education and training, through local and regional regeneration, and through rebuilding local communities within a less unequal society and economy.
This is a policy paper, but we have drawn as far as we can on research on Britain’s more deprived communities, and on the attitudes of those who live within them. The Open Society Foundation’s report on Higher Blackley, in North Manchester one of six studies of Europe’s White Working Class Communities, was particularly useful. We have also drawn on reports from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Resolution Foundation, the Sutton Trust, the Social Mobility Commission, the 2016 Hidden Needs Report from the Suffolk Community Foundation, and a number of parliamentary reports, as well as on the local government expertise and experience of working group members.
Raising skills, and educating the next generation
Investment in education and training is the key to lifting these communities out of a cycle of deprivation and depression. Britain still suffers from a worrying proportion of its population outside the labour market – parked on invalidity benefits (many nowtransferred to the Employment and Support Allowance), signed on for lengthy periods on the Job Seekers’ Allowance, or living off the ‘informal economy’. [Estimates of overall figures: 2.5m? To check: this makes a significant difference to estimates of ‘full’ employment] And they are concentrated in poorer former industrial communities, and smaller – often seaside – towns. The 2011 Census showed that 15% of all Manchester residents between 16 and 74 had never worked. Long-term joblessness, poor health and mental depression overlap with low skills and motivation, low aspirations for children, and poor parenting, thus transferring deprivation from one generation to the next.
The gap in educational outcomes between white working class boys – or, white boys in receipt of free school meals – and the rest of their age cohort ismuch wider than that for any other ethnic group. Lack of parental support, low aspirations, poor visible prospects of job opportunities, contribute to a culture in which teachers struggle and children drop out. A combination of factors contribute to educational failure: poor parental support, inadequate housing, absence of role models, the negative culture of communities where work is scarce and acquisition of skills seems to make little difference.
Britain has a long-standing, but worsening, shortage of vocational skills. Many of our recent migrants from other EU countries have been recruited to fill gaps in the availability of skilled and semi-skilled labour from within the UK: in construction, nursing, long-distance haulage, electrical and electronic technicians and so on. Worse, a high proportion of British workers in these intermediate skilled jobs’ are due to retire within the next 10-15 years. There is an evident market failure here, with manycompaniesreluctant to train their own workers, and with schools and colleges not providing appropriate preparation for such work.
Successive reports have analysed the high proportion of pupils on free school meals (from deprived families) who fail to attain adequate standards of literacy in English and Maths, basic requirements for most jobs above minimum wage level. They have pointed to the combination of factors that leave them in this position, from family background, local culture, and school. We reiterate that early intervention is key: that nursery provision targeted at these children and communities are highly cost-effective,avoiding the later welfare benefits and public services spent on the poorest and non-employed.
Poor children in the north starting school are already significantly worse off in terms of development than similar children in London. Too many of these children then fall further behind as they grow. Studies suggest that the transition from primary to secondary school is a point at which more children from deprived families lose confidence and aspiration. Poor quality careers advice, and the shortage of role-models of adults in attractive and well-paid employment then adds to teenage disillusion – leaving the rising generation in these communities far behind others in their age group, at as structural disadvantage in society and in the labour market.
There are underlying problems of social support and community morale behind this that require a range of policy responses; but one immediate response should be to prioritise pre-school provision within these communities. Primary schools in ‘difficult’ areas suffer from higher teacher turnover, and low teacher morale. Given the success of the pupil premium in targetting funding for schools, we recommend a ‘pupil premium plus’ for schools, calculated according to the proportion of students qualifying for free meals. Bonuses for teachers who work in these schools for more than three years will also recognise the contribution they make.
A continuing squeezeon school funding over the next three years, as costs rise and funding remains flat, will further damage the prospects of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. This is a false economy. Successor generations of unskilled, often demoralised British citizens add welfare and health costs to public spending, and sustain demand for immigrants with appropriate skills to fill the jobs they are unable to qualify for.
There have been repeated calls for greater integration of school and work in the final years of schooling – but so far little willingness from central government to encourage schools to allow space in the curriculum. Greater devolution from Whitehall to local government should allow for local employer organizations and individual companies topartner with local schools, for short attachments for secondary pupils to employers togain work experience, and to test out potential careers. Now that National Citizen Service has been incorporated by Act of Parliament, there may also be ways of extending the experience of NCS to include attachments to social organizations and public authorities, to widen the perspectives of participants to the diversity of the world of work. This would be particularly important in those places where some young people remain difficult to reach.