Inter-cohort Trends in Intergenerational Mobility in England and Wales: income, status and class (In Time)

Is Britain an open and fair society? Are the jobs people obtain and the incomes they earn down to hard work and ability, or to the wealth and status of their parents? Is it harder now than it was in the past for people from humble origins to rise to top of the occupational status ladder? Or are we becoming a more 'meritocratic' society as traditional class barriers break down and deference to authority seems increasingly to be a thing of the past? It is questions such as these that we are concerned with in this research project on trends in 'inter-generational social mobility' - the study of the extent to which our life chances are determined by the social and economic context of our origins and whether this is changing over time. In recent years, politicians in the United Kingdom have become very interested in social mobility, with parties of both left and right arguing that new strategies and policies are needed to make Britain a more socially open place to grow up in. The Blair and Brown governments initiated a number of high profile enquiries and reports on social mobility, while the current coalition government has specified increasing social mobility as its number one social policy objective for the parliament. Yet, despite the political consensus on the desirability of making British society more open and meritocratic in the future, there is much that we still do not know about how social mobility has changed - if it has changed at all - over the course of the 20th and 21st Centuries. In the past ten years alone, academic researchers have concluded that social mobility in Britain has gone up, down, and stayed pretty much the same - a set of conclusions which clearly cannot all be correct. The inconsistent and contradictory nature of the existing evidence base is not helpful for policy-makers, because it is difficult to develop and implement policies which will change things for the better, if we do not even know what happened in the recent past. Thus, while our research is necessarily historical in perspective, it is very much intended to inform the debate about the development of policy in this crucial area in the future. Our goal in this research project is, therefore, to bring clarity to the debate about recent trends in social mobility in the UK. We will do this by analysing a unique data source - the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Survey (LS) - which contains linked census records for over two million people in Britain between 1971 and 2011. The LS has a number of significant advantages over the sorts of data that researchers have used in the past, and will enable us to track people from childhood to adulthood, comparing the occupations they end up in at different points in their lives, to those of their parents decades earlier. We will use the LS to calculate and compare 'mobility rates' for cohorts of people born between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s. The very large sample size of the LS means that we will be able to draw very fine-grained and robust conclusions about trends in social mobility, not just for the population as a whole but for sub-groups defined by year of birth and type of social origin. Importantly, we will calculate mobility rates along three different metrics: occupational status, social class and income, in order to ensure that our findings address the key dimensions of people's social and economic position rather than focusing on only one, as has generally been the case in existing studies. A distinctive feature of our project is that it connects with policy-makers and stakeholders from the outset, in order to ensure that our findings have an influence in the world of policy-making and not just in academic debate.