Theresa May’s government is to set out a new social justice strategy early next year aimed at helping those even poorer than the “just about managing” households who will be singled out for a boost in the autumn statement.
The policy will be taken over by Damian Green, the work and pensions secretary, after concerns were raised among ministers that the government should not forget about those who are struggling even more than the group known as “jams”.
It is understood he is likely to set out the scope of the work in the next few weeks with a view to publishing a green paper in the new year.
A major plank of the strategy will be about addressing joblessness in families, which ministers believe would be the biggest step towards improving social mobility for children.
One person familiar with the thinking behind the work said it was designed to be the “son of David Cameron’s life-chances strategy”, which the former prime minister had aimed to make the focus of his final years in Downing Street.
May has concentrated many of her speeches on saying she will help the “just about managing” who are likely to receive modest help in the autumn statement, amid pressure from MPs for a freeze on fuel duty or a cut in air passenger duty.
The Resolution Foundation thinktank has calculated that there are almost 6 million working households who could be described as jams – with a net income of between £12,000 and £34,000 – and that their living standards have barely risen in a decade.
However, there are also many who are worse off than that, who are looking for work or earning less than £12,000 through part time jobs. Cameron first set out his life chances plan last January, saying he wanted to help those who “don’t just get left behind; they start behind”.
“Today in Britain, around a million children are growing up without the love of a dad,” he said at the time. “In Britain, a child born in a poor area will die an average of nine years earlier than their peers.
“In Britain, there are more young black men in our prisons than there are studying at a Russell Group university. These problems – they have been years in the making, and will take time to tackle.”
However, some will be sceptical of the Conservative government’s ability to address some of these problems, given the ineffectiveness of Cameron’s “troubled families” programme and oversight of years of cuts to benefits, soaring levels of food bank use, and lower funding for public services.
Since coming to power, Theresa May has brought in plans to bring back grammar schools which critics such as the Ofsted chief inspector have said could harm the life chances of children in non-selective schools.
A report from the Social Mobility Commission found last week that Britain has a “deep social mobility problem which is getting worse for an entire generation of young people”.
According to the commission, those born in the 1980s are the first cohort since the second world war to not start their careers with higher incomes than their parents and immediate predecessors. It also identified “treadmill families” who are running harder and harder but standing still.
Labour’s shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, said the government had created a “growing sense of two nations: the lucky few at the very top and the millions who make up ‘everyone else’.”
“Since they came to power in 2010 we have seen our country go backwards on the progress the Labour government made on social mobility,” she said . “The educational attainment gap between lower-income children and their wealthier classmates is getting bigger, and these children still have little chance of going into high-level professions.”
