Having explored the centralised Westminster government’s policy approach to social mobility, this section will outline the context of devolution. As this research is situated in Wales, it is important to understand the policy climate within a devolved Wales and how this might differ both rhetorically and practically to Westminster. The road to devolution in Wales began with the 1997 referendum that showed a slim margin of support for Wales to become a devolved nation. This led to the Government of Wales Act 1998 and the formation of the National Assembly for Wales with the first election of Assembly Members (AMs) in 1999 resulting in a Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition. Unlike fellow devolved nation Scotland, Wales only gained secondary legislative powers, limiting Wales’ legislative power until the Government of Wales Act 2006 where it became possible for Wales to make their own primary legislation (Morgan 2006; 2007; Williams and Mooney 2008).
The drive for devolution was situated within the broader agenda of New Labour in Westminster that had a focus on the modernisation of public services via neoliberal, choice and competition-
15 Abrahams (2017) also documents how some working-class graduates who do have social capital resources are less willing to use them in order to ‘prove’ themselves as worthy of their positions.
16 Careers in areas such as journalism, academia, medicine, and law are considered ‘elite’ in the Milburn Report (2009).
driven policy approaches, or the ‘Third Way’ approach (Mooney et al 2006; Williams and Mooney 2008). Devolution was seen as a method of ‘empowering’ localities to improve their public services, although the extent to which this was/is made possible is debatable (Mooney et al 2006; Andrews and Martin 2010). Despite devolution, there are several key policy areas which are still determined by the centralised Westminster government, notably the structure of welfare payments and foreign policy (Mooney et al 2006; Morgan 2007). This section will explore how much divergence there has been between the Welsh Government and Westminster, before taking a closer look at the economic positioning of Wales, the extent of poverty, and the Welsh Government’s approach to social mobility.
2.4.1. A different way of governing? Divergence from Westminster
In his 2002 speech denouncing the New Labour government’s approach to public services, Welsh Labour leader and soon to be First Minister of Wales Rhodri Morgan made clear that there was ‘clear red water’ between Welsh Labour and the New Labour government in Westminster. In this speech, Morgan claimed:
Our commitment to equality leads directly to a model of the relationship between the government and the individual which regards that individual as a citizen rather than as a consumer. Approaches which prioritise choice over equality of outcome rest, in the end, upon a market approach to public services, in which individual economic actors pursue their own best interests with little regard for wider considerations.
(Morgan 2002) It was elucidated in policy documents from early in the devolution process that the Welsh Government wanted to pitch itself on a different philosophical footing to Westminster politics, with Welsh rhetoric emphasising the importance of the collective, and of socially democratic values (Mooney et al 2006; Adamson 2008; Williams and Mooney 2008; Dicks 2014; Adamson 2016). There was resistance to the UK government’s approach to public services reform, with much more emphasis being placed on community involvement and engagement in Wales, especially in relation to addressing issues of inequality, opportunity, and poverty (Adamson 2008; Andrews and Martin 2010; Dicks 2014; Adamson 2016). Rees and Chaney (2011) argue that before devolution, Wales had a poor history regarding equalities and so the first term of the National Assembly saw legislation passed that promoted both human rights and equalities. The approach of the Welsh Government to social policy appeared to differ from Westminster with a more collaborative, social justice and equality focus.
Instead of treating individuals as neoliberal consumers, the Welsh Government vowed to treat individuals as active citizens, which became enshrined as a statutory requirement through the concept of partnership working (Morgan 2007; Bristow et al 2008; Williams and Mooney 2008; Andrews and Martin 2010; Dicks 2014). Partnership working under the ‘three thirds’ partnership
model strictly required public, private and third sector representation with the goal of promoting equality of opportunity. This came into fruition under the ‘Communities First’ programme, seen as a radical counterpart to England’s New Deal for Communities programme as it offered a fresh, citizen-focused approach to tackling poverty and regeneration using a non-prescriptive area-based policy (Adamson 2008; Dicks 2014). I explore Communities First’s relationship with social mobility in the following section and in Chapters Five and Seven, but for now it is important to highlight that this form of governance was considered different from Westminster politics because of its more inclusive, open and accessible nature, with the aim of re-engaging citizens with the political system. The extent to which this has been achieved has been debated (Chaney 2002; Laffin 2004; Morgan 2007; Bristow et al 2008; Dicks 2014).
Scholars have questioned the nature of the Welsh Government’s divergence from Westminster politics, suggesting that despite the rhetoric, many differences in policy occurred due to differences in population density within Wales and to Welsh Labour’s appeasement of the Liberal Democrats during their coalition government from 1999 to 2002 (Laffin 2004; Andrews and Martin 2010). It is suggested that instead of strong, ideological distancing from Blair’s New Labour government, practical differences within Wales led to policy divergence, with the Welsh Government actively avoiding confrontation with Westminster in its first term, although more divergence was pursued in its second (Laffin 2004; Andrews and Martin 2010). Health and education illustrated the effects of devolution, with policies introduced such as free breakfasts for school children, free prescriptions, and subsidised university fees for Welsh students studying in Wales (Morgan 2006; Andrews and Martin 2010).
One key difference introduced by the Welsh Government was the performance management of public services such as health and education. Instead of a competition-based, top-down management approach focused on meeting targets and performing in league tables, local governments were entrusted to ensure that services run optimally17 (Morgan 2006; Andrews and
Martin 2010). This rejection of New Labour’s model of choice and competition was mainly due to the sporadic spread of services and population over Wales’ terrain, deeming a competition- based approach unamenable (Andrews and Martin 2010). It has been argued that due to how Welsh representation operated pre-devolution (with a Welsh Office representative within Westminster), the Welsh Government lacked confidence and skill in designing policies that differed from the ‘Whitehall template’ (Morgan 2007). Overall, there is some dubiousness over the extent and success of the Welsh Government’s divergence from Westminster, especially when “residents in Wales had received the worst services after allowing for socio-economic and
17 With the clear exception of the reincarnation of the Communities First programme in 2012 which following a spending scandal, became monitored through Results Based Accountability (RBA) and answerable to the Welsh Government. See Dicks (2014) and Chapters Five and Seven for more details.
demographic factors, spend, and past performance” during the first five years of devolution (Andrews and Martin 2010, p.928). One area where devolution was expected to make a substantial difference was the economic position of Wales, especially in relation to employment, poverty and life quality.
2.4.2. The economic positioning of Wales: Poverty, employment and social
mobility
The campaign for devolution was fought on the notion that it would lead to greater economic success and the potential for an ‘economic dividend’ (Morgan 2006; 2007; Andrews and Martin 2010). Unlike in Scotland where the devolution campaign was strongly driven by the nationalist politics of the Scottish National Party, in Wales there were fears that propagating the nationalist argument would only cause Labour supporters to defect to Wales’ nationalist party, Plaid Cymru (Morgan 2006; 2007). This ‘one-partyism’ within Wales therefore led to higher expectations being placed on the Welsh Assembly to perform economically, despite initially having fewer constitutional powers than Scotland. Research has queried the ability of devolution to create an ‘economic dividend’, yet devolution in Wales was expected to bring prosperity to a nation which was, and is still, desperately struggling following rapid deindustrialisation (Morgan 2006; 2007; Andrews and Martin 2010).
Research into the labour market within Wales has highlighted the nation’s struggle to recover from recession and the loss of heavy industry which began in the 1980s (Morgan 2006; Adamson 2016; Lloyd 2016). This induced high levels of unemployment and led to the labour market suffering from chronic job shortages and an oversupply of low-quality and low-paid jobs (Felstead 2009; Dicks 2014), with roughly a quarter of Welsh workers in low-paid jobs (Lloyd 2016). Devolved policy towards the issue of employment did differ from Westminster with the ‘One Wales’ vision for skills and employment seemingly recognising that Westminster’s mass education approach is not the solution to the economic problems within Wales (Felstead 2009). Having said this, university fees for Welsh students studying in Wales were subsidised as an attempt to encourage the academically-able to remain in Wales (Morgan 2006). It is questionable how successful the ‘One Wales’ vision has been in producing an economy based on high-skilled, high-quality jobs as the rising education levels of the Welsh population have exceeded the availability of high-quality jobs, with many in jobs that they are over-qualified to do (Lloyd 2016). This qualification mismatch is a concern for Wales and its economy, demonstrating not only the limitations of devolution to have a significant impact on the structure of the economy (perhaps due to the amount of funding the Welsh Government receives from Westminster), but also the constraints placed upon Welsh citizens trying to move out of poverty’s grips.
As previously mentioned, the Welsh Government’s approach to tackling ‘social exclusion’ included spatial programmes of community development aimed at increasing the engagement of both individuals and communities within society, typically with an employability focus (Dicks 2014; Adamson 2016). Communities First18, the flagship area-based policy aimed to target
poverty and regeneration, was one of the main policy initiatives of the Welsh Government focused on social mobility, despite the relatively low-profile of social mobility within Welsh policy agenda (SMCPC 2013b). The poverty-focus of the Welsh Government drives social policy initiatives although many are akin to (and outlive) English policies19 (Adamson 2008; Dicks 2014;
Adamson 2016). The SMCPC noted the poverty-driven policy agenda as opposed to a direct social mobility focus, praising the Welsh Government’s flagship Communities First programme:
Tackling poverty in deprived areas: for example, through the Communities First programme focusing on improving the quality of life in the most deprived areas of Wales to help make it easier for families to take steps out of poverty, and helping to raise the aspirations of whole communities and to involve residents in developing their own local solutions.
SMCPC (2013b, p.118) Arguably, social mobility became an implicit aim of the Communities First programme when couched as a policy that aimed to improve and raise the aspirations of both individuals and communities, although lacking the explicit language of social mobility that dominates Westminster policy. This becomes pertinent when looking at Dicks’ (2014) evaluation of the then thirteen years of the programme, where she describes the shift from an active citizenship approach to community activation. The programme originally celebrated for its partnership working and community engagement became a prescriptive, target-driven programme which needed to show clear financial accountability. The focus, Dicks (2014) argues, became less about the power of the collective and more about managing the ‘risky’ behaviour of individuals. As I explore in Chapter Seven, this meant that Communities First began to reflect closely the neoliberal rhetoric surrounding social mobility that was highlighted earlier in this chapter, with a focus on improving ‘underperforming’ populations. Despite devolution initially offering a different rhetoric, a ‘clear red water’ between Wales and Westminster, with a sense of a more collaborative and collective approach to social policy, the same policy narrative has eventually emerged. This narrative situates social mobility as an issue of individual self-improvement often in relation to employability, ignoring the structural problems of the labour market and economic insecurity (Lloyd 2016), and people’s lives and connections outside of work.
18Communities First ran from 2001 to 2018 across Wales. For more detail about the development of the Communities First programme, see chapters Five and Seven.
19For example, Flying Start and its English equivalent Sure Start, an early years policy focused on the development of young children from disadvantaged backgrounds.