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While the struggling Conservative party convenes in Manchester for its annual party conference, it has much to ponder regarding its future direction. It’s not even clear if a clear direction remains open. We are in difficult days for a governing group that now has almost nothing, if anything, new or unique to say to the electorate.

The Missed Opportunity

It could have been so different if concrete steps had been made on an agenda that is important for people nationwide: Social mobility. But the former leadership lacked the slightest idea on how to convert the trendy talk on social mobility into policy reality. For the two years after the general election, it argued over what the phrase even meant.

I found it bizarre, because I’d already told the Prime Minister what social mobility meant when we originally talked about it during the contest for party leader. The phrase was a term I developed and used at the Department for Education to talk about social mobility. It was our departmental mantra, and its purpose is unambiguous: social mobility is the approach by which we realize fair chances – without removing opportunity away from those who already have it, but rather by providing options to those that lack them.

The Core Concept

An additional vital education department term we used, “potential is equally shared around the UK, however access isn’t”, served as a deliberate expression, representing the two parts of a fairness agenda. First, potential shared equally but not cultivated evenly through our schools and colleges. Second, chances not distributed fairly by businesses or our economic system. Thus, education and business were key to achieving stronger social mobility. This represented an mission about the community framework of our country – fostering individual capabilities and connecting them to opportunities.

What Levelling Up Became

What did the social mobility agenda evolve into under the Tory administration? A towns fund overseen from the DLUHC. Street beautification and reconfigured roundabouts and roads. An official policy document was published a significant period after the leadership change, which saw current strategies relabelled under the recently branded agenda.

Consequently, a wider fairness strategy went undeveloped, as well as all the improvement that it may have generated – in funding, enterprise, financial planning, taxation and in place-making. Additionally, in learning, including a higher education sector that has become a target for politicians of all stripes – although it remains the most powerful engine of life improvement for youth from modest backgrounds, like me, this country has had in recent decades. Perhaps the only engine of fair chances, functioning widely.

The Importance of Aspiration

Hope is crucial for our country to prosper. To foster ambition, there needs to be a realistic expectation that effort and reward are connected; that if people aspire, they can succeed. For political leadership, being able to create a outlook of positivity about the tomorrow is crucial. Analysis by the Institute for Policy Research at the academic establishment and others, recently released, showed that the education department’s targeted regions I launched while in office – place-based approaches to enhancing learning results – led to youth in those neighborhoods being up to 18 percentage points more positive about their life ahead than those in comparable communities without these schemes in place. The evidence is clear: just making an authentic start on equal chance initiatives can rapidly and effectively change how people feel about their future.

Squandered Chances

Unaware of these findings, and in the middle of its successor selection process, in autumn 2022, the Tory administration closed opportunity areas down. What reason would someone in those regions vote for a political group that took that action? The targeted programme is one example of what had the potential to be a transformative Conservative government agenda on levelling up, but that possibility was completely wasted. Strategies such as this can inspire hope and aspiration. In contrast, as the Conservatives discovered, failing to deliver of social mobility is the costliest mistake any government can make. Voters held accountable the leadership for its failure but, perhaps most of all, for its failed pledges on social mobility.

The Current Landscape

Now the responsibility on social mobility and equality of opportunity has been transferred to a new administration. The levelling up rhetoric has been discarded. The current administration has its own policy language of “removing obstacles to success”. The political group that is steadily supplanting the struggling Conservative party, Reform UK, also has its own message – “industrial revival”. It’s a phrase to talk about fresh prospects in areas like the one I was raised in, in my hometown. It suggests that an historical manufacturing base can reincarnate into an modern manufacturing sector.

For voters, it must feel like a Groundhog Day-style loop. Identical problem, different language. Yet, currently, little improvement.

Lessons for the Future

If Labour and Reform UK want to prevent the same fate, both these parties should learn from the Tories’ mistakes on social mobility; that equal opportunity talk is one thing, but effective implementation of improved opportunities is far more challenging. The UK’s chronically poor equal opportunity remains the central problem for our country, with youth unable to get a decent career start, those putting in effort in employment with little to show after the rent has been paid, and citizens throughout the UK without any actual expectation their next generation will be able to do improve in life than they have.

Leaders can discuss fairer opportunities however much they like. But where is the party that has the complete plan on social mobility? I see none. Whoever gets there first, succeeds. Not just for their organization, but, significantly, for a entire nation that has never needed equality of opportunity so desperately.