Social mobility and exclusion in the legal profession

Last summer, when arch-Blairite Alan Milburn produced a report for the Cabinet Office on social mobility and the professions, it got limited publicity.

The assumption was that this would not be a political priority for an incoming Conservative government; and while many corporate clients ask law firms about their progress on diversity, almost none push their providers on their record in promoting social mobility.

With Milburn’s appointment as social mobility tsar, the issue is back on the agenda. But what are Milburn’s intentions towards the legal profession?

It’s likely there will be plenty of continuity between his approach now, and the one he took in last summer’s report. In the report’s original call for evidence, it was made quite clear that the committee writing the report didn’t want to hear about economic inequality as a cause of worsening social mobility – throwing the spotlight firmly on the professions themselves.

That analysis chimes well with the coalition’s worldview. As chancellor George Osborne has made clear in interviews, when the government talks about its commitment to equality, it primarily means equality of opportunity, not income.

Going by the report’s conclusions, Milburn will now focus most closely on the parts of the legal profession where the financial rewards are greatest. Recommendations he made – around work experience programmes, outreach work in schools, extra financial support for internships, and mentoring schemes – all fit with the resources larger firms can deploy. And when he references geographic ‘deserts’, where the professions he has in mind are badly represented, he is referring to areas of the country that lack, not a high street practice, but larger firms.

It’s the super-City gent-type professionals he seems to believe are getting away from the working and lower-middle classes – and as they do so, successfully erecting discreet barriers to entry.

He’s likely to carry on looking closely at entry routes to a career in the law as well. If firms decide that actively supporting social mobility is a reputation issue, they will want to look at how a lawyer would join the firm later in life, how they might qualify while in a non-lawyer role, and whether their firm’s policies on qualifications required allow for a variety of routes to be taken by an aspiring lawyer. He’ll stick hard by the income bands he used to measure a decline in social mobility – put simply, is the proportion of lawyers who grew up in households with a below-average income rising or falling?

Another thing Milburn won’t do is open up the pressing issue of how the organisation of publicly funded work affects some of the country’s more ‘accessible’ and diverse legal practices. He won’t look at higher education funding or student debt.

That may make the tsar a frustrating figure to engage with. But with or without Milburn, social exclusion and social mobility are likely to grow in importance as issues for the legal profession.

Elite universities have been under pressure and close scrutiny on this point for a generation now. It’s worth noting that the HE institutions that have made some progress here aren’t merely criticized less; they also seem to gain a competitive advantage. It’s early days, but the few managing partners whose firms have started to make deliberate changes in this area report intakes that they believe have raised standards.