Deepening the Opportunity Mission
Our new report on why tackling inequality is key to the success of Labour’s opportunity mission, and how to make it happen
This is the executive summary of our new report, Deepening the Opportunity Mission. Read the interactive version online, download the PDF, or read and share our twitter/X thread. We are running a webinar today to discuss the report’s findings - find out more here.
Breaking down barriers to opportunity is one of the new Labour government’s five missions. And Labour understands that this requires action outside as well as inside the classroom. Their general election manifesto points out that “greater opportunity requires greater security”, while the original opportunity mission document argues that “housing and job insecurity are barriers for too many people from disadvantaged backgrounds”. The battle against the five giants has not been won; squalor and want, in particular, have made a comeback in recent decades.
There’s plenty of evidence to back up the assertion that poverty and inequality are barriers to opportunity to such an extent that no government could ever succeed in giving everyone equal opportunities without substantially reducing both. This report lays out some of the latest research on this topic. More recently still, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published a report showing that on average, primary school staff estimate that 48% of their pupils have experienced hardship at some point since the start of the school year. That’s a shocking statistic. Children can’t learn if they don’t have enough food, sleep, secure and decent housing, or physical and mental health.
And the philosophical arguments are equally persuasive. John Rawls proposed the fair equality of opportunity principle: that everyone should have a truly equal chance to succeed in life, regardless of their class, race or sex. This goes well beyond overcoming discrimination, requiring much more radical action than many assume. We have attempted in a previous report to summarise the difference between what we call ‘deep opportunity’ and ‘shallow opportunity’, but in this report that job is taken on by an expert in the field, Martin O’Neill, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of York.
The inescapable conclusion of both the empirical and the normative literature is that inequality is unfair, for two reasons: because a lot of it is caused by circumstances outside people’s control (i.e. unequal opportunities), and because unequal outcomes in one generation preclude equal opportunities in the next. Some fascinating new research from the London School of Economics suggests that in the UK, 30% of income inequality is “unfair’ because it is directly linked to inherited characteristics that, by definition, are outside people’s control (race, sex, place of birth, family background etc); the report notes that this figure is probably an underestimate. The report also provides new evidence of the existence of the ‘Great Gatsby curve’, which shows that income inequality is correlated with inequality of opportunity, proving that you cannot level up opportunities without first making significant progress on levelling up outcomes.
Inequality of various forms – wealth, income, sex, race, region, disability and so on – is not only unfair; it is also actively harmful, for all of us. By hindering opportunity, it wastes talent, reduces productivity and incentivises rent seeking over productive enterprise, and as a result it is a barrier to economic growth. Research into ‘inequality as cholesterol’ finds empirical data to show that inequality caused by factors outside people’s control is bad for economic growth. And inequality’s throttling of opportunity has another, perhaps even more serious impact: it weakens the bonds that hold us together as a society, and undermines people’s trust and participation in the democratic process. Inequality is a barrier to all of five of Labour’s missions, as we showed in our recent report The Canaries, and as we will argue in our forthcoming Wealth Gap Risk Register. Tackling income poverty alone will not be enough to achieve the opportunity mission and its stablemates; we also need to look at excessive wealth.
The public agrees. 85% of Britons are concerned about inequality, and 83% agree with the need to reduce inequality to support fairer opportunities, while 75% are concerned that very wealthy people have too much influence on the political system, and 69% are concerned about current levels of wealth inequality in the UK.
While Labour understands that action to break down the barriers to opportunity must take place outside the school gates as well as within them, there is a risk that the non-education parts of the opportunity mission will be deprioritised now that they are in government, because they are difficult and because they span the remits of multiple government departments and Ministerial portfolios.
And this risk is blinking red on the dashboard – high-likelihood, and high-impact. Missions are long-term projects; fair enough. But if the Labour government is not able to noticeably improve people’s life chances and living standards by 2029, there is a real risk that far-right parties will capitalise on this failure and achieve a result in that year’s general election that has to date been dismissed as impossible. As Robert Shrimsley argued in the Financial Times in June: “A Starmer government may be British politics’ last chance to halt the populist radical right. A flatlining economy and stagnant real wages have left many voters angry — unsure that traditional politics can bring the better life they demand. Mainstream parties cannot afford to keep failing them.”
If we’ve established that inequality is a barrier to opportunity, is inherently unfair, is unpopular with the public, and is undermining our economy, our society and our democracy, what can we do about it?
Labour set out its first steps for change in May - including recruiting 6,500 new teachers. Now it needs to work out its next steps. And it needs to set out some detailed targets against which it can measure progress on its missions. For the opportunity mission, these need to include targets for a range of ‘complex outcomes’ that span the different barriers to opportunity, covering social security, education, work, housing and health at a minimum.
This report suggests some indicators to measure these ‘complex outcomes’, without recommending specific targets for each. It also outlines the sorts of policies that will be needed to make meaningful progress on those outcomes, by driving change through a combination of investment, regulation, incentives and taxation. Some of these policies are relatively straightforward, such as tackling insecure work, but some are more ambitious, such as introducing a citizens’ inheritance.
There is no way to break down barriers to opportunity without making the necessary investments in our social and physical infrastructure to reduce inequality and poverty, and this will require new sources of revenue. The inescapable conclusion is that substantial changes are needed to how we tax wealth in this country.
However, this report does not set out to generate a detailed list of policy suggestions, or to argue for specific policies over others. Nor does it seek to explain how to bring those policies about, in terms of the politics or the detailed policy milestones.
Instead, its main contribution, beyond arguing how and why tackling inequality is necessary for achieving the opportunity mission, is to set out some of the ways in which the machinery of government could be reformed to enable progress on these cross-cutting inequality targets, building on recent work on the ‘how’ of making mission-driven government effective, so that government departments have the ability and the incentives to work together towards these shared goals.
We outline nine recommendations for working across government to reduce inequalities:
1. An explicit focus on reducing inequalities
2. Strong political leadership and investment
3. A Secretary of State focussed on fairness, equality and opportunity
4. Effective accountability and delivery mechanisms
5. Stronger institutional support
6. An Equality Delivery Unit at the centre of Government to drive progress
7. An evidence-based approach to prioritisation and ‘What Works’
8. Open and collaborative working
9. Strengthening legislative levers
This is the executive summary of our new report, Deepening the Opportunity Mission. Read the interactive version online, download the PDF, or read and share our twitter/X thread. We are running a webinar today to discuss the report’s findings - find out more here.