Social mobility is influenced by where ancestors lived

There are clear and enduring regional divides across Great Britain, finds an intergenerational assessment of the social mobility of British families between 1851 and 2016, carried out by UCL researchers at the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC). Professor Paul Longley, Dr Justin Van Dijk and Dr Tian Lan (all UCL Geography) created GB Names which allows users to chart exactly where their family group has been based across Britain from 1851 to the present day. This allows users to profile the social mobility outcomes for their family name, measured in terms of the quality, range and types of neighbourhoods in which group members live. The results greatly extend our understanding of the ways in which social mobility outcomes are shaped by geography - as most conventional studies of social mobility are restricted to measuring changes in occupations over just a single generation. The researchers have charted the social mobility of more than 13,000 British family groups from 1851 to 2016, by coupling family group data for the entire Victorian population with a present-day population-wide consumer register. Each family group was given a score summarising the relative neighbourhood deprivation experienced by every adult family group member in Great Britain today, based upon English, Scottish and Welsh Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). This summary score provides a measure of the relative degree of hardship experienced by the residents of every neighbourhood and is strongly indicative of social mobility outcomes, comprising weighted measures of income, employment, health, education, crime, barriers to housing and living environment.