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While the beleaguered Tories gathers in Manchester for its yearly gathering, it has plenty to consider regarding its future direction. There is uncertainty if a road forward remains open. These are difficult days for a governing group that now has almost nothing, if anything, new or unique to say to the electorate.

An Alternate Reality

Things could have turned out markedly improved if concrete steps had been made on an policy focus that is important for people nationwide: Levelling up. But the previous administration hadn’t got the slightest idea on how to convert his zeitgeisty rhetoric on social mobility into actual implementation. For the two years after the 2019 election, it discussed what the term actually signified.

It seemed strange to me, because I’d already told Johnson what levelling up signified when we originally talked about it during the contest for party leader. The expression was language I created and used at the Department for Education to talk about equal opportunity. This became our core mission, and its meaning is unambiguous: social mobility is the means by which we achieve equality of opportunity – not through reducing prospects away from those who possess it, but rather by expanding opportunities to those that lack them.

The Core Concept

The other key ministry expression we used, “ability is distributed uniformly throughout the nation, yet chances are not”, again was a purposeful phrase, representing the two parts of a fairness agenda. To begin with, talent spread evenly but not cultivated evenly through our learning institutions. Furthermore, access not provided uniformly by businesses or our market. Thus, schools and companies were crucial to achieving improved equality of opportunity. This constituted an mission about the social fabric of our country – investing in human talent and providing access to opportunities.

The Reality of Implementation

What did the social mobility agenda become under the previous government? A towns fund managed by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Hanging baskets and reconfigured roundabouts and roads. A government strategy was published nearly three years after Johnson became leader, which saw ongoing initiatives relabelled under the recently branded agenda.

Therefore, a broader social mobility agenda went unpursued, as well as all the improvement that it could have inspired – in capital, enterprise, fiscal strategy, revenue and in local regeneration. Moreover, in education, including a university system that has become a punchbag for politicians of all stripes – although it remains the most powerful engine of life improvement for young working-class people, personally, this country has had throughout modern times. Maybe the only engine of fair chances, working extensively.

Why Hope Matters

Ambition is crucial for our country to succeed. To foster ambition, there needs to be a realistic expectation that hard work and results are related; that if people dream big, they can achieve. For any government, being able to foster a feeling of hope about the future is important. Analysis by the research body at the academic establishment and others, published last month, showed that the education department’s targeted regions I established during my tenure – community-focused methods to improving education outcomes – led to young people in those communities being up to 18 percentage points more hopeful about their prospects than those in equivalent locations without these programmes in place. The evidence is clear: just making an authentic start on pro-social mobility policy can quickly and positively change how people perceive their prospects.

Squandered Chances

Oblivious to this, and in the midst of its successor selection process, in autumn 2022, the ruling party terminated the programmes. What reason would someone in those regions vote for a political group that took that action? The opportunity areas policy is one example of what might have become a transformative administration strategy on levelling up, but that opportunity was hopelessly squandered. Methods such as this can create belief and drive. Conversely, as the ruling party found out, failing to deliver of fair chances is the costliest mistake any political party can make. Voters penalized the government for its ineffectiveness but, primarily, for its broken promises on levelling up.

The Current Landscape

Now the baton on equal opportunity and fair access has been taken up by a new administration. The previous terminology has been discarded. Labour has its own public messaging of “removing obstacles to success”. The political group that is steadily supplanting the struggling incumbents, the alternative party, also has its own message – “economic renewal”. This expression to talk about new opportunities in communities like the one I grew up in, in my hometown. It claims that an historical manufacturing base can be reborn into an revitalized economy.

To the electorate, it must seem like a repetitive cycle. Same issue, alternative phrasing. However, so far, no progress.

The Way Forward

Whether the government and opposition want to avoid the same fate, the respective organizations should understand the previous government’s errors on social mobility; that equal opportunity talk is simple terminology, but effective implementation of improved opportunities is significantly more difficult. Britain’s persistently low life chances remains the primary challenge for our country, with young people unable to get a proper professional launch, those working hard in occupations with little to show after the rent has been paid, and people across the country without any genuine belief their children will be able to do improve in life than they have.

Leaders can talk about fairer opportunities as much as they want. But where is the party that has the complete plan on social mobility? I observe no such party. The first to achieve this, prevails. Not just for themselves, but, significantly, for a complete society that has never needed equality of opportunity so desperately.