Social Mobility Commission, conclusions already written?

The Liberal Democrats have announced today that Martin Narey, Chief Executive of Barnados and Chair of the 'End Child Poverty Coalition' will chair an independent Commission on Social Mobility "to advise the party on how to help British youngsters from disadvantaged families fulfil their potential."

The other commissioners have yet to be announced, and the group is due to report in July. However given the ECPC is a political campaign rather than an independent expert group, we can reasonably assume that Narey's preferred conclusions will not be a million miles from the aims of the ECPC (here).

These include some aims that already coincide with party policy or were part of Clegg's leadership platform, such as building more affordable housing, eradicating child poverty by 2020, better access to child care so parents can work, providing better early years education, increasing state funding to private funding levels, and personalised learning agendas.

They also though include suggestions for large untargeted welfare rises (better articulated here) that would require massive tax rises. And bizarrely ramping up the minimum wage to levels that would destroy jobs and increase poverty by creating European-style insider-protection and encouraging off-shoring.

It will then be interesting to see if Clegg balances the Commission to include some credible economists alongside the anti-poverty activists.

I've written before about some of the problems with the definition of poverty by the government. Broadly if you think poverty and inequality are the same thing or rather some arbitrary level of inequality like 60% of median income... and that it must be eradicated as a moral absolute... then your policy agenda will inevitably become skewed towards redistributing income in the short-term to hit your targets rather than the partnership measures between the state, organisations and individuals required to alleviate deprivation, create opportunity, and encourage personal and familial responsibility. That latter is also harder to put on a t-shirt.

The further problem with that is that targeting inequality can actively undermine attempts to target long-term deprivation by creating poverty traps that make seeking work, being responsible, or saving relatively unattractive options.

The ECPC agenda is a bit of a mishmash of the two.

It will be interesting then to see if Nick Clegg or his representative on this Commission has the courage to ask for a more credible definition of poverty than the current UK inequality-goal, and a consistent, costed approach to tackling it. Or whether like the ECPC the Commission simply comes up with another or the same wish list of impossibly expensive and contradictory measures and leaves the party to pick the package that works.

At which point the Commission will have enhanced the influence of the ECPC on the Liberal Democrats, and created hostages to fortune if we reject their advice, but made no tangible difference to what the party would have decided had we simply invited the ECPC to participate as witnesses in our traditional policy review process.

In conclusion an bold, impactful idea, with a big-name and think-tank style-format to generate media interest. But some worries about the agenda implied by the appointment, what changes it really means, and how the output will be handled.