Tony de Vizio is a senior commercial leader and serves in education governance. He writes on growth, opportunity and economic change.
The Conservatives have rediscovered aspiration. That’s good. But aspiration alone is not enough. We need to stand behind the belief that effort leads to progress and build an economy that enables advancement at every stage of economic life. Unless we do, we run the risk of aspiration just being another cliché.
Across Britain, the promise that today’s effort leads to tomorrow’s progress has fractured. We talk about aspiration, education, hard work, home ownership, business investment – but these are just nouns or policy islands. As Conservatives, we need to go further and tackle the arrows between the nouns, so that individuals are more capable of taking each step forward. This is not about mapping out life journeys or just tweaking how institutions operate but enabling an economy of advancement that rewards and compounds individual achievement.
There is also another, equally important, aspect that needs to be in place for an economy of advancement to flourish: self-determination. People moving through a set of desirable economic stages is not enough. For economic advancement to take hold, people need to have more control over their future choices.
The role of government should be one of enablement, in terms of both reducing the frictions that hinder economic progress and removing barriers that limit someone’s ability to choose their next economic goal. It is this delicate balance between creating better economic pathways and improved self-determination that will harness aspiration and fuel economic growth.
This impacts how we look at policy. The recently published The Right Way provides a good basis, setting out that Conservative policy should start with the right principles, address properly diagnosed problems, and then be outcome driven. But we need a way to apply this direction to economic progression.
To this end, we should consider using an Advancement Test – a test that asks whether a policy just addresses the here-and-now, or whether it creates further options that encourage advancement, improve opportunity and widen economic benefit.
The Advancement Test also needs to be operational rather than just a hollow slogan. Through this lens, every major economic reform should look to answer the following five questions:
Which economic stage is it trying to strengthen? Which adjacent economic policy areas are improved, or impacted? What new choices would success make possible for someone? Will those gains endure and compound, or create a constraint elsewhere or later? What future outcome would show that the reform worked?
For apprenticeships, new starts are not enough – sustained employment, recognised skills building and greater earning power matter.
For housing, transaction numbers are not enough – what matters is the location of housing to growing work opportunities and whether work and saving become a more credible route to ownership.
For enterprise, start-ups are not enough – success should also mean survival, growth and founders being able to innovate, reinvest and enter new markets, so that they increase productivity, employment opportunities and build further.
The aim is not equality of outcome, nor is it for government to decide what progress should look like for every person. The objective is to create the conditions and environment in which people gain greater self-determination, better see the opportunities ahead of them and have more freedom to shape their own future.
Britain’s own experience shows what happens when this test is not met. Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme turned many council tenants into owners, giving families an asset and greater control over their economic future. However, too many homes were sold and not replaced – and we are still feeling the consequences of this today. A policy that benefits one generation while adversely impacting the next is not delivering economic advancement.
Conversely, other countries are showing how economic advancement can be delivered. Singapore’s Central Provident Fund connects earnings-based saving with housing and retirement. This helps turn earnings into economic assets and greater security earlier in working life. Britain should not copy a far more state-led system, but the principle is worth noting, in that work, saving, asset-building and long-term security are connected and treated as one system, with adjacent policies being revised together, rather than being kept in separate silos.
The Advancement Test also helps clarify the political choice.
Reform’s Apprenticeship Wage Credit and £2,000 retention bonus uses a targeted incentive to encourage apprentices to stay with the employer who trained them for two more years. This, along with the party’s other proposed measures, can strengthen stages of the economic journey, like work entry, training and retention. However, they do not form part of a wider framework that encourages progression.
Labour is going further, adopting a more joined-up approach to education, skills and employment. V Levels are being introduced to open another route into further study, apprenticeships and work. The Jobs Guarantee is designed to move young people into sustained employment, while Skills England is looking to connect skills development more closely to market requirements. Yet these initiatives follow a state-led, top-down approach that only focuses on the education-to-employment transition – not the full economic-life journey.
Our opportunity is to go further still, by widening the lens, and enabling the entire journey, with self-determination at its heart. We need to address all the arrows across the economic-life journey: the question should not stop at whether somebody gets into work, but whether that work builds relevant skills, whether those skills increase earning power, and whether higher earnings lead to savings, asset ownership and wider choices.
Reform offers targeted incentives. Labour seeks to build state-supported pathways across only part of the journey. The Conservatives must look at the whole journey and enable greater self-determination so that every step forward equips people with the choices and capital they need to progress.
The spirit of economic advancement already lives across Conservative policy. The proposed First Job Bonus would place up to £5,000 of a young person’s National Insurance contributions into savings for a first home or future financial security, thereby linking the start of working life directly to building an asset base that can expand someone’s future choices. Abolishing stamp duty on primary residences also bolsters advancement as it converts more of what has been saved into a home, which in turn leads to greater security, resilience and improved future options. These policies do more than work on their own. They help people move forward at different stages during their economic lives.
To enable advancement, policy needs to be more rigorously thought-through, interrogated and scenario tested from the outset, not only on its own merits but also on its impact and repercussions on adjacent policy. Advancement will also require institutions to work together more collaboratively and intentionally, removing obstacles and identifying smoother routes that connect one stage of economic advancement to the next. Then policy outcomes need to be measured, challenged, improved, and refined from day one, not years after enactment. For government, the question is not whether it acts or retreats but whether people emerge better able to act for themselves.
A Conservative government cannot guarantee where somebody finishes. It should not try. But it can build an economy of advancement where every step forward, wherever you are in your economic journey, makes the next one easier, giving people greater control over their own lives.
Tony de Vizio is a senior commercial leader and serves in education governance. He writes on growth, opportunity and economic change.
The Conservatives have rediscovered aspiration. That’s good. But aspiration alone is not enough. We need to stand behind the belief that effort leads to progress and build an economy that enables advancement at every stage of economic life. Unless we do, we run the risk of aspiration just being another cliché.
Across Britain, the promise that today’s effort leads to tomorrow’s progress has fractured. We talk about aspiration, education, hard work, home ownership, business investment – but these are just nouns or policy islands. As Conservatives, we need to go further and tackle the arrows between the nouns, so that individuals are more capable of taking each step forward. This is not about mapping out life journeys or just tweaking how institutions operate but enabling an economy of advancement that rewards and compounds individual achievement.
There is also another, equally important, aspect that needs to be in place for an economy of advancement to flourish: self-determination. People moving through a set of desirable economic stages is not enough. For economic advancement to take hold, people need to have more control over their future choices.
The role of government should be one of enablement, in terms of both reducing the frictions that hinder economic progress and removing barriers that limit someone’s ability to choose their next economic goal. It is this delicate balance between creating better economic pathways and improved self-determination that will harness aspiration and fuel economic growth.
This impacts how we look at policy. The recently published The Right Way provides a good basis, setting out that Conservative policy should start with the right principles, address properly diagnosed problems, and then be outcome driven. But we need a way to apply this direction to economic progression.
To this end, we should consider using an Advancement Test – a test that asks whether a policy just addresses the here-and-now, or whether it creates further options that encourage advancement, improve opportunity and widen economic benefit.
The Advancement Test also needs to be operational rather than just a hollow slogan. Through this lens, every major economic reform should look to answer the following five questions:
Which economic stage is it trying to strengthen? Which adjacent economic policy areas are improved, or impacted? What new choices would success make possible for someone? Will those gains endure and compound, or create a constraint elsewhere or later? What future outcome would show that the reform worked?
For apprenticeships, new starts are not enough – sustained employment, recognised skills building and greater earning power matter.
For housing, transaction numbers are not enough – what matters is the location of housing to growing work opportunities and whether work and saving become a more credible route to ownership.
For enterprise, start-ups are not enough – success should also mean survival, growth and founders being able to innovate, reinvest and enter new markets, so that they increase productivity, employment opportunities and build further.
The aim is not equality of outcome, nor is it for government to decide what progress should look like for every person. The objective is to create the conditions and environment in which people gain greater self-determination, better see the opportunities ahead of them and have more freedom to shape their own future.
Britain’s own experience shows what happens when this test is not met. Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme turned many council tenants into owners, giving families an asset and greater control over their economic future. However, too many homes were sold and not replaced – and we are still feeling the consequences of this today. A policy that benefits one generation while adversely impacting the next is not delivering economic advancement.
Conversely, other countries are showing how economic advancement can be delivered. Singapore’s Central Provident Fund connects earnings-based saving with housing and retirement. This helps turn earnings into economic assets and greater security earlier in working life. Britain should not copy a far more state-led system, but the principle is worth noting, in that work, saving, asset-building and long-term security are connected and treated as one system, with adjacent policies being revised together, rather than being kept in separate silos.
The Advancement Test also helps clarify the political choice.
Reform’s Apprenticeship Wage Credit and £2,000 retention bonus uses a targeted incentive to encourage apprentices to stay with the employer who trained them for two more years. This, along with the party’s other proposed measures, can strengthen stages of the economic journey, like work entry, training and retention. However, they do not form part of a wider framework that encourages progression.
Labour is going further, adopting a more joined-up approach to education, skills and employment. V Levels are being introduced to open another route into further study, apprenticeships and work. The Jobs Guarantee is designed to move young people into sustained employment, while Skills England is looking to connect skills development more closely to market requirements. Yet these initiatives follow a state-led, top-down approach that only focuses on the education-to-employment transition – not the full economic-life journey.
Our opportunity is to go further still, by widening the lens, and enabling the entire journey, with self-determination at its heart. We need to address all the arrows across the economic-life journey: the question should not stop at whether somebody gets into work, but whether that work builds relevant skills, whether those skills increase earning power, and whether higher earnings lead to savings, asset ownership and wider choices.
Reform offers targeted incentives. Labour seeks to build state-supported pathways across only part of the journey. The Conservatives must look at the whole journey and enable greater self-determination so that every step forward equips people with the choices and capital they need to progress.
The spirit of economic advancement already lives across Conservative policy. The proposed First Job Bonus would place up to £5,000 of a young person’s National Insurance contributions into savings for a first home or future financial security, thereby linking the start of working life directly to building an asset base that can expand someone’s future choices. Abolishing stamp duty on primary residences also bolsters advancement as it converts more of what has been saved into a home, which in turn leads to greater security, resilience and improved future options. These policies do more than work on their own. They help people move forward at different stages during their economic lives.
To enable advancement, policy needs to be more rigorously thought-through, interrogated and scenario tested from the outset, not only on its own merits but also on its impact and repercussions on adjacent policy. Advancement will also require institutions to work together more collaboratively and intentionally, removing obstacles and identifying smoother routes that connect one stage of economic advancement to the next. Then policy outcomes need to be measured, challenged, improved, and refined from day one, not years after enactment. For government, the question is not whether it acts or retreats but whether people emerge better able to act for themselves.
A Conservative government cannot guarantee where somebody finishes. It should not try. But it can build an economy of advancement where every step forward, wherever you are in your economic journey, makes the next one easier, giving people greater control over their own lives.