The second priority is to ensure that every adult gets a fair deal. We should recognise that this is unachievable for those adults who didn’t get a fair chance to succeed as children. But we should do as much as we can for people in this situation, while ensuring that future generations enjoy the same equality of opportunity in adulthood as they have done in childhood. Our approach to giving adults a fair deal is based on rewarding hard work while protecting against bad luck. Our vision of the ‘fair necessities’ for adults cuts across all ten of our focus issues:
Democracy: Ensuring that everyone has an equal chance to make their voice heard and influence the national, regional and local decisions made on their behalf, during elections and day-to-day
Education: Giving everyone equal opportunities to maximise their potential, and ensuring fair access to relevant further and higher education options
Environment: Ensuring that everyone has an equal chance to live in a healthy and safe environment, by doing more to protect those at greater risk from pollution and from the impacts of the climate crisis
Health: Providing more resources for public health services to support wellbeing and prevent ill health, alongside curative healthcare services
Housing: Making sure that everyone is able to access affordable, secure and decent housing, whether in the social sector or private sector, and that housing is seen as a right and not a commodity
Justice: Ensuring that everyone has equal access to the law and receives equal treatment from a justice system that is better resourced and more focused on rehabilitation
Social security: Building a strong social security system to protect people from bad luck, which provides proactive support for those who lose their jobs or need to retrain, compassionate support for those with disabilities or illnesses, and a decent pension and affordable social care for everyone
Taxation: Building a more effective tax system that taxes unearned income and wealth more fairly as well as reducing tax avoidance and evasion
Wealth: Ensuring that rewards, including compensation for high earners, are proportional to effort and incentivise wealth creation rather than wealth extraction, speculation or rewards for failure
Work: Ensuring fair and open competition for jobs and promotion (as well as fair wages and good working conditions and secure terms of employment)
The aim is not to impose a uniform equality of outcome that compensates for different levels of talent or hard work, or to cancel out the effects of good luck. Instead, the objective is to minimise the impact of bad luck, while ensuring that the good luck is shared around a little, so ensuring that everyone has a decent quality of life regardless of whether they have 'made it'. We need to ensure that people have equal opportunities at every stage of their life.
In the short term, this will require society to treat different people differently – to pursue equity, not equality, so that those who are more disadvantaged get more support to enable them to overcome the additional barriers that they face. If every adult is to get a fair deal, we need to pay particular attention not only to those who are on lower incomes. We also need to focus on the specific barriers faced by members of disadvantaged groups, in particular certain ethnic minorities as well as women, LGBTQ+ people and the disabled. Consider, for example, the fact that almost half of people in poverty in the UK are either disabled or live with a disabled person. In the long term, we need to tear down those barriers. This is equity in the sense of channelling more resources to disadvantaged people and communities to ensure genuine equality of opportunity (while providing public services on a universal basis wherever possible), for example by investing in social housing (with priority given to certain groups), providing additional funding for disadvantaged pupils, upgrading infrastructure in deprived communities, and rolling out a universal early years education service but with extra resources for those in greatest need. There is a false dichotomy between universal and targeted interventions; public services should benefit everyone, while providing extra support for those in greater need, rather than delivering separate targeted schemes for particular groups that stigmatise recipients, exacerbate inequality and alienate those who are not beneficiaries.
We also need to recognise that different groups in society have different priorities. For example, members of some ethnic minorities see improving their safety and security as the overriding concern, followed by more equal access to employment and to education and other public services.
