David Willetts

In this speech, David Willetts explains how public policy should interact with social change, and looks at some of the changes in the workplace and in the family which have caused a lot of comment.

“Let me start with some basic points we should all be able to agree on.

Conservatives have deep roots in British society. We do not follow some abstract canonical text and judge our country from outside. We have discovered our principles by tackling the problems we see around us. Our behaviour and political agenda has to reflect the world as it is today. We must not become the political equivalent of one of those historical groups formed to re-enact ancient battles for bemused spectators rather than fighting the ones that matter today. We can tackle Britain’s problems not by abandoning our principles but applying them to today’s issues. We have not just got to look and sound truly representative of Britain as it is today: that has to be the reality. Our second landslide defeat last year showed, if more proof were needed, that there is indeed no alternative.

We don’t need anguished internal debates about these points. They are the basis of the strategy Iain Duncan-Smith set out very clearly in his speech at Harrogate in the Spring and carried forward in his powerful speech last week. We don’t need to debate the strategy endlessly, we need to get on and do it. This evening, therefore, I am not going to reflect on Conservative principles nor elaborate on that list of points. Instead I am going to offer a picture of British society today, focussing on two of the most important parts of our lives – our jobs and our families.

We have heard a lot about how we need to come to terms with Britain as it is today. But we have heard little about what exactly we think Britain is like today. This is surprising for a party that prides itself on its practicality. Looking outwards to Britain today is not some shallow presentational device. It must rest on a pretty clear understanding of what our country is really like now. Our country is changing. But how? What sense can we make of the changes? And what human needs should our policies try to address? Let’s start with a critique of modern society that strikes a chord with many Conservatives.

“All fixed, fast, frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with his sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.”

It just so happens that the words I quoted came from the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx. But, for these purposes at least, we can count him as speaking for many Conservatives.

Does a consumer society erode our traditions and even degrade our characters? Everything can seem so shifting and impermanent in a modern capitalist society. What can you hold on to? Are any traditions or institutions secure? What would Conservatives want to conserve in such a society? Or do we just look at these changes with a mixture of bewilderment and concern?

Both jobs and families are thought to be more impermanent than before. We do indeed appear to be becoming a society of transient relationships – with our employers and our partners - just as Marx predicted. Sometimes the only question seems to be whether to celebrate or bemoan the transformation that is going on. When it comes to the labour market Conservatives are seen as welcoming this sort of change whereas when it comes to families the boot is on the other foot. So it might be illuminating to compare and contrast what is happening. The picture may be rather more complicated and intriguing than the conventional wisdom.

Jobs and the Labour Market

We are all supposed to be changing jobs and indeed changing careers much more than in the past. Speeches from Cabinet Ministers and articles from commentators are littered with platitudes about the new flexible economy in which we have portfolios of different jobs instead of traditional careers. Jobs for life are supposed to be on the way out. Our knowledge is supposed to become out of date so quickly that we need core skills instead.The only trouble with these fashionable beliefs is that there is virtually no evidence to support them .The Economic and Social Research Council has been sponsoring valuable research on the future of work. Let me quote from what have they found. ” In 1992 the average time a worker spent in a specific job was 74.3 months – six years and two months. But in 2000 the figure had actually risen to 87.7 months.” You may think this is just because we were in recession then. But that explanation doesn’t hold. Most job moves are voluntary and in recessions employees anxiously hold on to the one they’ve got rather than move on to another job. So economists expect periods of job tenure to get shorter when the economy is growing as people choose to change jobs. Back in 1992 they would have predicted that if the economy grew steadily for the next eight years then average length of job tenure would get shorter. Instead the opposite has happened.Nor is there a move to temporary contracts. The ESRC research shows the trend is actually in the opposite direction. As many as 92 per cent of workers held permanent contracts in 2000, compared with 88 per cent who did so eight years earlier.

We are not moving around doing a range of different jobs at the same time either. Again, let me quote the evidence. A larger proportion of workers were employed in one specific workplace in 2000 (78 per cent) compared with ten years ago when 76 per cent were.

As Robert Taylor , the distinguished commentator on the labour market, concludes in his Report, ‘Britain’s World of Work’:

“The evidence simply does not sustain the view that we are witnessing the emergence of a new kind of employment relations seen in the end of the career and the death of the permanent job for life.”

The OECD did a similar study across advanced western economies a few years ago and came up with very similar conclusions . They just could not find this fundamental shift in the nature of our careers in the data.

Some industries have indeed fragmented over the past decade, with new businesses emerging on the scene. As a result we can find dramatic shifts to shorter periods of employment with one firm in some sectors of the economy. The media and communications industry is one example. That happens to be the industry which the commentators come from. They are making the classic mistake of interpreting what is happening to them as the trend across the country as a whole. Even here, of course, many people still have a lifetime career albeit with a greater number of employers.

People do have to be flexible in the way they work – but that can be in a chosen career and with a chosen employer. It may well mean enhancing one’s skills in a specific job. It doesn’t mean we have to be frantically chopping and changing what we do. Indeed, there is even some good economic theory which explains the resilience of long-term employment. Economists have begun to recognise the value of something which Conservatives have long understood – tacit knowledge. This is knowledge that is not necessarily written down, let alone captured in a diploma or a certificate. It has a real value nevertheless. The longer you work for an employer the more knowledge you have, making you more valuable to him. And much of this knowledge is tacit - he knows you have this knowledge, when outsiders do not, so he can value you better than other potential employers. Moreover, much of this knowledge may be very specific – worth more to your employer than to anyone else. One of the reasons why Professor James Heckman received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2000 was that his empirical research captured the value of this learning by doing and showed how it increased as you stayed with an employer.

There is no evidence of a fundamental shift to short and transient periods of work with a range of employers. But we are all familiar with the facts that appear to show that something is changing in the labour market. Many people do have more jobs during their lifetime. People who take up a new job have an increased chance of leaving it again soon. These facts are true too. But how can they be true as well? Is the conventional wisdom right after all? There is an important clue if we look at evidence from the Labour Force Survey, assembled by the Pension Provision Group. It shows that about 20 per cent of employees changed their employer at least once in the previous year, but the rate of change declines markedly with age. The proportion who had started with their current employer in the last year are :

• for those aged 16 to 19, as many as 58 per cent;
• for those between 20 and 24, about 40 per cent;
• for those aged between 25 and 49, about 17 per cent;
• for those aged 50 to state pension age, only 9 per cent.

It is young people who are by far the most frequent job changers. Over half of all job changes occur before the age of 30 and a quarter before the age of 20. Most job mobility is accounted for by people aged under 30. And young people move jobs more frequently than they did before. In 1975 those under 25 could expect to be in their second job within three years of entering employment . By the 1990s they could typically be expected to be entering their fourth job. We do indeed have more jobs during our lifetime but this is almost entirely accounted for by more jobs before we are 30.

The explanation for this increase in job mobility among young people is that they are trying out a greater range of jobs before they settle down to their chosen careers. There are many more options now. Job satisfaction matters more to people. As a result, they are taking longer to find the job that suits them best. They don’t want to rush in to a career decision at the age of 18 or 21. They try out different options over a longer period and quite possibly go abroad to experiment even more widely. They positively enjoy the change, the diversity and the impermanence. That’s fine for them. But most of them do want a stable career and the evidence is that they do eventually settle down to just that, often with one employer. A longer period of youthful experiment is wrongly being interpreted as a fundamental change in the way we all work.

Families and Relationships

Now let us turn from the economics of the labour market to what might seem to be the very different world of personal relationships. But we might find some rather interesting parallels because in both cases we are talking about a profound human need – for attachment.Are our relationships more tenuous and our marriages more fragile? Again there are commentators – at both ends of the political spectrum – who say that stable marriages are on the way out. Instead we are told we experience a shifting range of far more tenuous relationships. Sometimes just about everybody appears to agree about this : the only disagreement is whether the change is for better or for worse – to quote, rather appropriately, from the marriage service. There is a very intricate story here.It is certainly true that people spend more of their lives on their own than before. But what are these periods? There are many elderly people living on their own after the death of a spouse. Many more young people live on their own or with a group of friends. In the old days you left your parents’ home and got married. Now you leave your parents’ home and share a flat with friends. We have added longer stages to the life cycle outside the married family. So if you count households you can show there are many more of them which are not traditional families.

Cohabitation has transformed the picture as well. You often have a spell cohabiting with your boyfriend or girlfriend. These cohabitations rarely last long. They are not a long-term alternative lifestyle. They either split up or they lead to marriage. Sometimes there is a child and then the relationship breaks up bringing with it a host of difficulties both for the child and for the parents.

These are real and important social changes. The causes are complicated and so are the effects. Some of them are bad for children. Others are bad for adults. I am not complacent about these. But this evening I want to offer one interpretation of what is going on. It is not the whole story but I believe it is an important part of the story. We are taking far longer than before to find the right partner, but we are still searching for that person with whom we want to spend the rest of our lives. Everything takes far longer than it used to because we are far more choosy and it takes longer to get the knowledge we need about a potential partner.

Cohabitation itself is a very good example of this phenomenon. In the l960’s 5% of women cohabited before they married. By the 1990’s 70% of women cohabited before they married. That on its own significantly delays marriage. But cohabitation itself is being delayed as well. We have a longer period of sexual activity before we form any live-in partnership. We now have our first live-in relationship four years after sexual activity begins for women and seven years for men. That means that the median age of our first cohabitation is itself being delayed – for women it has risen from 21 to 23.

Cohabitations themselves are far more fragile than marriage. Within 10 years 30% have dissolved and 40% have turned into marriage. And after a cohabitation breaks up people have on average two years living on their own – or back with their parents – before they cohabit again. But most people – especially women – enter a cohabitation hoping it may turn into marriage.

All this pushes back the average age of marriage. 30 years ago nine out of ten women had married by their 30^th birthday. That is now down to two-thirds of women being married by then. The average age of our first marriage is rising steadily. It has reached 30.5 years for men and 27.3 years for women. This statistic is a good example of how an important social change is easily misinterpreted. As a result of the rising age of marriage it is obviously correct to say that a declining proportion of adults are married. When you add in divorce and widowhood you can predict a future where less than 50% of people are married. But it is wrong to conclude from this that there has been a big decline in the number of people getting married. There is a lively debate amongst the demographers about the trends in the total percentage of adults who are ever married. It peaked at over 90% and it is still forecast to be well over 80%. So most of us end up getting married, it’s just that it takes us longer. If you look at the evidence from attitude surveys they show how resilient and widespread is marriage as an aspiration. Most single pregnant women wish they were married when they had their babies – and most will marry within 3 years of the birth of the baby.

There was a very interesting survey of the attitudes of 25-year-old women. They had had an average of 8 partners; two-thirds had had a one-night stand; a quarter had slept with more than one person in a day. So they had thoroughly modern attitudes to sex – or they were boasting. But 90% also said that they would like to get married and that they then expected their marriage to be faithful.

There is an important clue here to what’s going on. It is not that marriage has been rejected. If anything we have higher hopes of marriage then ever before. If you ask people whether they think it’s wrong to have an extra-marital affair you get a very significant result. 69% of 45-54 year olds think it’s wrong. When you ask 25-30-year-olds, a higher percentage, 78% do. They have not of course had the same experiences of the compromises of real life that middle-aged people have had. But it also reveals that their expectations are high, perhaps too high.

This evidence suggests to me that what’s going on is not an abandonment of marriage but a longer search for the right partner and with much more trial and error en route. And we can test this even more rigorously by looking at the factors which lead to a relationship breaking down. It is often the result of new information which couldn’t possibly have been known when the relationship started. In the words of Professor Ermisch, one of our foremost experts on the subject, most of the significant predictors of the outcomes of cohabiting unions “are not known for certain at the start of the union but rather evolve during the union.” That is particularly true of male earnings which an important predictor of whether a cohabitation will survive and turn into a marriage. The uncomfortable truth is that earnings – especially male earnings – affect marriageability. But because of changes in the jobs market it takes longer before you can estimate how much your prospective spouse might earn in future. This is one of the connections between our analysis of jobs and of relationships.

If we think in terms of people spending longer searching and discovering about relationships that work then the rise in the divorce rate takes on a different complexion as well. It is a very serious problem; I don’t want to deny any of that. But one of the most important reasons why the divorce rate is going up has been a very big increase in the divorce rate amongst newly marrieds. In the old days people got divorced after a long marriage. Now they are far more likely to get divorced in the early years of marriage. In other words not only has cohabitation become a precursor to marriage, but also the early years of marriage have become more like a cohabitation.

We need to understand people still aspire to stable long-term relationships in a marriage but also understand this increasing gap between the aspiration and the reality.

There is no abandonment of marriage. Most young people still want to get married. In fact you could say the problem is that marriage matters so much to us. We attach more importance to the emotional depth of our relationship with our partner. We are more demanding. That means it takes us longer to find the right person. It is not that we have abandoned permanent attachments. We are spending longer searching - ask Bridget Jones - but we have not abandoned the quest.

Parallels

Now you may be struck by the obvious parallels about what I’ve said about jobs and what I’ve said about relationships. Indeed, it is more than just a neat parallel, there are direct causal links between the two changes. Settling down with your lifetime partner and settling down with a steady job often go together. In the twenties we move around the country as we look for the right job, and that makes it is more difficult to sustain a long-term relationship. When you get on your bike to find work it is not likely to be a tandem.Underneath these changes in jobs and relationships there is a single story. We are more consumerist, if you like, in our approach both to jobs and to relationships. We have high expectations – perhaps too high – and we spend much longer trying to get the decision right. But after a much longer period of experiment and mobility than in the past most of us do make that decision. After we search we settle. That is because there are deep sources of human satisfaction which come from long-term commitments and trust.It was once said of libertarianism that it was a theory for childless immortals. And that of course is what you feel like in your twenties. It is the period in our lives to which the doctrines of libertarianism is ideally suited. The world is your oyster. You don’t have any ties. You don’t use public services. Everything is mobile.

That stage of the lifecycle is celebrated in the media. It drives the images in our advertisements. It is what gives London and other great cities their pace and energy and creativity. It is an important part of people’s lives and it is getting longer. We should understand it and value it but not be transfixed by it. It remains just one stage of the life-cycle.

There are lessons here, both for the Left and for the Right. We start with one of the most sophisticated and respected Blairite thinkers – Anthony Giddens. He has taken some of these social changes and exaggerated them. He thinks we are indeed in a post-modern world of shifting loyalties and thinner relationships – just as Marx had predicted. “Jobs for life” or “marriage” get put into quotation marks – a deadly way of detaching a concept from the social reality behind it. They are presented as dead traditions when really they are still the experience of many and the aspiration of even more. In Giddens’ world we are endlessly choosing new social roles through our lives and never settling.

Such a theory of the end of permanent attachments could well appeal to Blairites in the process of remaking their own Party. If they were busy detaching their Party from its roots, we should not be surprised that they embraced a theory which said that was what the rest of us were doing as well. But it is a misunderstanding of Britain. Blair’s attempts to reconstruct Britain around this theory of jostling, shifting, temporary lifestyle choices is out of touch with the reality of the lives and aspirations of most British people. It is the difference between the Millennium Dome and the Golden Jubilee.

There is no room in the Giddens theory for families and children. You won’t find much about parents and children in the Third Way. This emphasis on choice and change which so dominates Blairite thinking is really a theory of friendship. It doesn’t work as an account of the family and all the obligations that come with that because it does not value or understand obligations that are not chosen. You don’t choose your parents. But half British adults with a living mother see her at least once a week. And the latest research shows the extraordinary continuity of “family-centredness”. To quote from one ESRC Report: “Family is still seen as more important than friends for the vast majority; 4 out of 5 people would rather spend time with family than with friends. You won’t find much about parents and children in the Third Way. They do not fit in. This may be one reason why Blair’s Government has found it so difficult to develop any sort of coherent family policy.

This account shows, therefore, that some of the propositions at the heart of New Labour thinking just don’t stand up to careful scrutiny. But what does this line of thought mean for Conservatives? We are a one-nation Party but we can’t be a one-generation Party. In the past poets wrote about the seven ages of man. Now sociologists talk about the different stages of the life-cycle. And clearly we have to show imagination and human sympathy in recognising how people, especially young people, lead their lives today. There is no point in tut-tutting as young people make their choices.

After all social changes can be for the better. Moreover, many social changes can’t be reversed. I personally would much rather live in Britain in 2002 with all its problems than the Britain of 1952 with all its social cohesion. If we are the Party of economic change we can’t be against social change which often accompanies it.

There is no point twitching at the net curtains as society changes around us. We rightly criticise the National Health Service because it has failed to respond to the way the world has changed since it was founded as a state bureaucracy. But that argument applies to the rest of society as well. People have become more consumerist. That is a change the public services need to catch up with. But we can’t put fences round such consumers and not expect it to affect all of society.

I am not saying that the Party should move to the wilder shores of libertarianism. As Conservatives we understand the power of commitment, trust, and attachment. These are important sources of human satisfaction. We don’t want to live lives where more and more of the most precious human experiences resemble shopping.

Now I recognise that the evidence that I have offered this evening will be challenged by some who will say that that is precisely the direction in which we are heading. At the heart of this is a debate about whether we are becoming an atomised society of individuals with weaker and weaker ties to each other. As one commentator put it pithily, are we moving from tribal brotherhood to universal otherhood. If this is the direction in which we are heading then it is the biggest social trend which underpins much else that is happening to our society. Marriage break-up, cohabitation instead of marriage, lone parenthood, childlessness, are all, on this interpretation, just stepping stones on a journey to a world in which every one of us lives on our own. Our relationships become thin and contractual instead of rich and deep. We have sexual partners but we don’t live with them. We have jobs but we don’t stick with any of them for very long.

That is not my vision of a good society. I don’t think it answers fundamental human needs. None of us can know whether that is the way in which we are heading. Marriages could become even more fragile and tenuous. On the other hand the older you are when you get married older the greater the chance that the marriage will survive, so the delay in marriage could help preserve it. But I don’t claim to be sure that this optimistic interpretation is right. Given these uncertainties, what is the best way for responsible politicians to contribute to the public debate and help shape public policy?

The pessimist wants us to warn of the complete breakdown of stable married families. But I fear that this sends out exactly the wrong message. It plays into the hands of those who want to present marriage as just one of a series of lifestyle options. It appears to accept that Giddens is right and long-term attachments are dying out. That is debilitating. I don’t want people who are trying to hold their marriages together to feel that they are on their own fighting a battle against powerful social forces. I want them to know that there are millions of other people who still lead their lives like that, that there are long-term sources of human satisfaction that come from leading a life in that way. The fact that people have more partners before they get married and are delaying marriage doesn’t mean that marriage is on the way out. If these habits of the heart, as they have been called, can still be spoken of as the mainstream of British society that is a far better way of supporting and encouraging them than talking about them as if they are some endangered species poised on the brink of extinction.

The approach I have set out this evening is a better guide to public policy. We can’t take on all of society and demand government change it fundamentally. What is crippling is an anxiety about social change in Britain so pervasive that it leaves people strangely powerless when it comes to try to do anything at all. It would be the worst of all possible worlds to give an impression of vague dissatisfaction with contemporary society in general together with an absence of any purposeful attempt to tackle any social problem in particular. What we need to do, and under Iain’s leadership we are doing, is to turn it the other way round. We should recognise that society is changing but then we should focus all our energy on particular social problems, indeed social evils, that do need to be tackled. There are people struggling desperately in some of our most hard-pressed communities to bring up their children decently or hold down a job who are crying out for our help and who are entitled to expect it. We can show vision and energy and commitment in trying to help them as Iain’s speech last week showed.

There is a real challenge here for policy makers and it is only the Conservative Party which can rise to it. Social changes which are enormously liberating for affluent people in their 20’s and 30’s can have devastating impacts on hard-pressed communities where people are anyway leading lives on the edge. It was said of Bloomsbury that people lived in squares and slept in triangles. And if you have a private income and an enormous network to support you you can get away with such a lfiestyle. But the same lifestyle for people who have sadly had a much tougher deal from life and face erratic earnings, poor education and bad housing can have a devastating impact. And some of the social changes which I have described today began amongst the middle classes and have then been transmitted with powerful cultural messages to society as a whole. Cohabitation is a very good example. It began as a middle class phenomenon in the 1960’s. Now it has spread throughout society. The evidence assembled by Professor Ermisch and Professor Francesconi support this argument. Women born between 1950 and 1962 were 2.8 times more likely to cohabit if their father was in a professional job and 30% more likely to cohabit if their father was in a managerial job. Working class traditions survived long after the middle classes abandoned them. But for women born after 1962 there is no gap in cohabitation rates determined by the social class of the woman’s father. Social change is widespread throughout all of society. But its effects different groups. So it’s the most vulnerable members of our society who suffer most from some of these social changes.

And here we are back into the old British territory of social class and social deprivation. These mothers with children in cohabiting relationships are more at risk of their relationship breaking down and far more at risk of becoming dependent on benefits. They are heavily concentrated in some of the most deprived parts of the country.

There is a real social problem here. So we can trace the paradox in which a pattern of behaviour begins in the middle classes, then becomes evenly spread but when it is evenly spread it has particularly damaging outcomes with people in our most deprived areas.

Yet they also are the ones who are on the receiving end of most public policy. They are the ones whose areas are most dependent on public money. They are the ones who are perpetually dealing with public agencies from schools and hospitals to the benefits system and public transport. We have an obligation to help them in particular. Social changes which liberating from the perspective of a loft in a part of trendy South London look very different when seen through the grime of a public housing project in the Midlands or the North. That is where public policy has most let people down, through everything from inadequate schools to a tax and benefit system which sends out exactly the wrong signals about work and marriage. That is where we should be focussing our efforts. Iain Duncan-Smith’s speech last week showed that we are.”