Technology and better transport key to Yorkshire's prospects - Joe Seddon

Does last week’s Wakefield by-election spell the end of the Government’s levelling up agenda?

In 2019, Wakefield was one of 45 ‘Red Wall’ seats captured by the Tories in what appeared to be a dramatic political realignment of the post-industrial North.

Out of this election victory came a promise to ‘level up’ the UK by spreading opportunity more widely and revitalising towns that had suffered decades of neglect by Westminster. However, with the Tories’ electoral coalition fracturing and voters increasingly cynical about vague promises to ‘level up’, the prospect of radical change appears bleak.

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On June 9, Katharine Birbalsingh gave her inaugural speech as the Chair of the Social Mobility Commission. The commission advises the Government on how to create a society where the circumstances of birth do not determine outcomes in life.

Past chaos at Leeds station.Past chaos at Leeds station.
Past chaos at Leeds station.

Yet, the broad stroke of Birbalsingh’s message was that Government policy should focus less on unlocking radical change in young people’s lives and more on enabling smaller, more “manageable” achievements. According to Birbalsingh, rather than asking how we can propel students from Yorkshire into leading universities and graduate careers, we should instead focus on supporting students to find opportunities in their hometowns.

She has a point. Not everyone wants to go to Oxbridge, become a lawyer, or launch a company. Newspapers and politicians love to glamorise ‘‘rags to riches’’ stories of individual achievement, but what about the majority of people who cannot access these opportunities?

What Birbalsingh’s speech omits is that young people from low-income areas’ ability to break into top universities and careers is a bellwether of society’s ability to utilise talent from all backgrounds. If we lose our focus on opening access to these transformative pathways and instead narrow our focus to opportunities on the doorstep, it will inadvertently instil a fixed mindset that background determines success. This is the antithesis of social mobility.

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Take my story, for instance. I grew up in Morley, a Yorkshire town steeped in a rich history and a proud keystone of the textile industry. Having grown up in a single-parent family, I worked my way from state schools to a place at Oxford University. After graduating in 2018, I am now running a tech startup, Zero Gravity, which has to date received £4m investment and led me to be named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

My story is an outlier – but it shouldn’t be. In my final year at university, seven students from Morley applied for a place at Oxford – all seven of them were rejected. Seventy-five per cent of startup investment still goes to founders from wealthy backgrounds. It’s abundantly clear that the odds are stacked against people like me succeeding.

Talent is spread evenly, but opportunity is not. We still live in a country where 45 per cent of your career earnings is dictated by how much your parents made when you were born. But things don’t have to be this way. In Scandinavia, parental income only has a 20 per cent influence on your future earnings. BCG estimates that if we could increase social mobility to just Scandinavian levels, we’d increase GDP by £140bn by 2050.

But how do we realise this brighter future? Two solutions stand out.

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The first is leveraging technology to level the playing field. In the same way that Wikipedia democratised access to information, companies like Zero Gravity are building technology that democratises access to opportunity. Our platform connects young people from across all four corners of the UK with mentors, masterclasses, and a membership community of like-minded students to propel them into the best universities and careers. So far, we’ve supported 3,000 students from low-income backgrounds into top universities, and we’ve now partnered with businesses like HSBC and KPMG to enable leading employers to recruit the best talent from all backgrounds.

The second solution is improved transport links. It can take as long to travel from one side of the Wakefield postcode area to the other than to get from London to Wakefield. Better connections will create new opportunities for ambitious young people. This is how the Government can reconcile social mobility with offering better opportunities closer to home. Social mobility shouldn’t have to mean – as it did for me – leaving your home town to follow your ambitions.

- Joe Seddon is founder and CEO of Zero Gravity and grew up in Morley, West Yorkshire.