Liam Byrne
Labour MP for Birmingham, Hodge Hill, Chair APPG Inclusive Growth.To address social inequalities, Liam Byrne asks where can political parties come together to find solutions?
It is the biggest act of wealth destruction on record. We knew spiralling interest rates were a catastrophe, but just before the summer the Resolution Foundation laid bare the bill – the rising cost of money has now sent up in smoke an incredible £2.1 trillion of household net worth in just two years.
Yet, of course, it is not bad news for all. Over the same period, 2021-2023, those luckiest enough to luxuriate in a place on the Sunday Times Rich List, including Rishi Sunak, have seen their wealth rise to £710 billion.
Wealth inequalities
This gulf between the haves, have nots – and have yachts – is now the core dilemma in British politics. Since 2010, our economy has created over £4 trillion in new wealth: but when the top 1% is growing its share of the pie thirty-one times faster than everyone else, we know something is going wrong.
Amidst the abundance, for those without, like those in my constituency – the most income deprived in Britain – things are very tough indeed. In 2021, the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch reported, “the lowest-earning bracket of British households had a standard of living that was 20 per cent weaker than their counterparts in Slovenia” and that on “present trends, the average Slovenian household will be better off than its British counterpart by 2024, and the average Polish family will move ahead before the end of the decade.” New analysis showed, that if we stripped out London, the country would be poorer than Mississippi. New ONS figures reveal that one in 20 adults reported running out of food – and unable to afford more. We can’t go on like this.
This is the dilemma which the All Party Parliamentary Party for Inclusive Growth, which I founded a decade ago, has set out to resolve. And together with the Policy Institute at King’s College London and the Fairness Foundation we have now completed a new programme of research to pin down those solutions and determine which approaches the public will vote for.
Addressing inequalities through inclusive growth
First, we asked experts for their proposals. Through Opinium we then surveyed 2000 people around the country to find out what people think about inequality, what they think the fixes are and what they think is credible for government to action. Our first report was a bit of a shock: wealth inequality is considered so harmful that people now believe that the very rich are more powerful than national governments – and they believe the situation is going to get worse. But, our second deep dive into the data revealed a striking level of consensus on the best ways to tackle poverty and inequalities, which challenges conventional narratives about post-Brexit divisions in the UK.
Analysis of responses by demographic breakdowns within the population showed a surprising degree of concurrence across political, generational and other divides. People don’t see action in one area as being a ‘magic bullet’ for reducing inequality in Britain over the next 10 years. But, for example, there are very consistent views of tax system measures among different generations and voters for the two main parties.
We followed the research with a packed-out conference in the House of Commons – Towards the Manifestos: What’s the agenda for fixing poverty and tackling inequalities? – with expert speakers and an equally expert audience. And in our conclusion, my fellow APPG Co-Chair, Conservative MP John Penrose, and I were able to sum up where we think some of the cross-party consensus might lie, under agency and assets; people and places:
· Agency: maximising the individual / family ability to improve their circumstances, such as tackling the health inequalities that hold people back, damage participation in the labour market and deny access to justice
· Assets: the way we support people in creating assets is critically important to ensuring that people can share economic growth, for example access to housing – and not simply any old housing, but high-quality new build – and savings
· People: connected to agency is an agenda of ideas that centre on how we empower people to make the most of economic growth to get on in life from early years to transforming the provision of vocational and technical education
· Places: raising the level of economic growth around the country (also known as ‘Levelling Up’) was identified as a key area of potential consensus, but key to progress is how we improve the quality of infrastructure such as regional transport systems.
So, this is a starting point for a big debate. At both Labour and Conservative party conferences, the Policy Institute at King’s College London will host panel events where we hope to accelerate a frank conversation. Post-conference, we’ll be talking to the business community at a roundtable with Business Fights Poverty and planning next steps with the Policy Institute at King’s College London and the Fairness Foundation – plus new work with our think tank partner, the Centre for Progressive Policy.
We’d love to have you as part of the conversation. If, like us, you think this is important, it’d be fantastic if you’d get in touch. We’re not going to solve this in Westminster alone.