Levers for levelling up: Relationships

This morning I spoke at the Bright Blue online event, After the White Paper: Levers for Levelling Up, alongside Robert Jenrick, Damian Green, Anushka Asthana, Angela Lockwood and Rob Waltham.

There are different views about what it will take to ‘level up’ Britain; indeed, there are different views about what levelling up really means. Although the phrase is relatively new, attempts to expand opportunity have been a focus of governments for decades (even for centuries, as Jack Brown’s book The London Problem explains).

At the Bright Blue event, Jenrick focused on the role of local government, devolution and education; Green focused on fairer access to housing, while Asthana talked about the challenges of political prioritisation, particularly when this agenda is so broad.

I have a slightly different perspective, which is that levelling up — the more even distribution of opportunity, prosperity and pride — isn’t primarily about how we organise democracy, or housing, or top-down economic growth strategies, or even education and skills funding per se. The power and powerlessness that shape Britain are held in place through something else: a ghettoisation of social capital as manifested in relationships.

Think about the backgrounds of people in positions of cultural and economic power: 74% of senior judges who interpret our laws went to private schools; 51% of leading journalists went to private schools; two-thirds of Boris Johnson’s government went to private schools. Almost identical proportions went to Oxbridge. How this affects opportunity, prosperity and pride is not just about education or any other area of government policy: it’s about the support and protection, the networks of opportunity and horizon, and the cultural cues that those connections afford the privileged — like access to internships, understanding of established dress codes, jargon, speech and intonation, confidence and more.

On the other side of the coin, meanwhile, 39% of state school pupils say they don’t know a single person in a job they themselves would like to do, a proportion increasing to 45% amongst those receiving free school meals.

So the thing that’s really going to level up Britain is what I call relational equity or relational justice: the need for more people to know and support one another across different backgrounds and life experiences; the more even distribution of agency through relationships, neighbourliness and networks which carry cultural and economic power; and a focus on social connection and cohesion as a route to a more empathetic society and, as an extension, more equal opportunity.

Luckily, there is a small reference to this in the Levelling Up White Paper — albeit a vague commitment — to a Community Spaces and Relationships Strategy. So what should that strategy look like?

At The Cares Family we’ve seen what positive relationships across difference look like, and we know how to enable those relationships to thrive. Our research tells us there are five key aspects to what works:

• Bringing people together to share meaningful experiences — not just space;
• Enabling equal-status interactions (and mutually experienced value) between people from different walks of life;
• Nurturing people’s agency to improve their own lives and the lives of those around ;
• Cultivating a shared sense of belonging within and to a specific place;
• Providing space for kinship — and viewing this solidarity as core to civic purpose.

It’s not just The Cares Family that holds these relational principles as fundamental to expanding power and opportunity. A new wave of civic institutions has arisen in recent years that sing from the same hymn sheet: Good Gym brings older and younger people together through exercise for mutual benefit; GirlDreamer helps young women of colour to gain confidence and power through relationships so that they can succeed in the corporate world, and so the corporate world can benefit from their inclusion; Little Village is expanding social solidarity across class lines through a national network of baby banks. All these new connecting institutions introduce people to other people who are not like them — and in doing so create lasting relationships that distribute power and opportunity over time. We should do more to promote and support those amazing institutions.

This is not radical stuff. It’s actually mainstream, and popular: in a poll last year for The Cares Family and Power to Change, 76% of adults said that investing in social infrastructure should be as much of a priority for the government as investing in physical infrastructure.

Clearly, levelling up is not just about trains, housing, technology, education or growth at all costs. Rather, government and civil society have an amazing opportunity, now, to work together to make sure that we collectively prioritise relationships and community, by supporting people to connect to the local people and places around them that mean something to them, and with institutions that bring people together to nurture those relationships.