Somewhere in Westminster this week, a new unit is being wheeled into existence. Its job: to do for social class what other Whitehall teams already do for race, sex, disability and LGBT+ rights. Ministers are, in effect, formally admitting that being working class is a barrier to getting on in Britain and they want a dedicated corner of government to prove it, measure it, and eventually do something about it.
For most industries, this would be a two-minute read filed under "interesting, but not my problem." Insurance doesn't get that luxury. Class has been one of this sector's most stubbornly awkward statistics for years, and a government suddenly keen to put socio-economic background on the same footing as protected characteristics is not exactly nothing for an industry that still, by its own trade body's admission, promotes people from wealthier backgrounds faster than everyone else.
According to reports from The Times, the new unit will sit inside the Office for Equality and Opportunity, the Cabinet Office body that already leads on equality policy, the ethnicity and gender pay gap data, and usefully for this story, has been working towards something called the "socio-economic duty" for a while now.
That duty is not new; it's been sitting unused in Section 1 of the Equality Act 2010 since before some current graduate trainees were born. Successive governments have simply declined to switch it on. Scotland and Wales did switch theirs on, back in 2018 and 2021 respectively, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission has been comparing notes from both nations to help England catch up. If it finally gets commenced here, public bodies would have to actively weigh how their big strategic decisions on transport, health funding and schools affect people from poorer backgrounds, rather than treating it as an afterthought.
The other headline change is less popular with at least one part of the equalities establishment: the Social Mobility Commission, the quango set up under the coalition government to nag ministers about social mobility from the sidelines, is reportedly being wound down, with some of its functions folded into the new unit. It never had teeth to force anyone to do anything, which, depending on who you ask was either its main flaw or the reason nobody in Whitehall was especially frightened of it.
Insurance likes to think of itself as a meritocracy that occasionally gets an unfair press. The reality may be a more complicated story. Research commissioned by the City of London Corporation and the Bridge Group, and widely cited by the industry's own diversity groups, found that people from lower socio-economic backgrounds progress roughly a quarter more slowly through financial services careers than colleagues from wealthier backgrounds, despite no gap in performance. Separate figures used by the Association of British Insurers suggest close to nine in ten senior roles in financial services go to people from higher socio-economic backgrounds which is a wildly disproportionate share, given only around a third of the general working population comes from that bracket.
To be fair, the sector isn't ignoring this and some in the industry have been saying so for a while. Katherine Conway, Aon's head of diversity, inclusion and community affairs, told this title some years back at the industry's Dive In Festival that social mobility tends to get left behind in D&I conversations that are more focused on gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Judging by where the sector's numbers still sit today, that observation has aged uncomfortably well.
The ABI's DEI blueprint explicitly names socio-economic status as one of its priority areas, and a growing number of insurers now collect data on staff parental occupation the industry's slightly clunky proxy for "what class were you at 14." Employers including household-name insurers regularly submit themselves to the Social Mobility Foundation's Employer Index, which ranks firms on how seriously they take opening up recruitment and progression to people from all backgrounds. None of that is nothing. It's just not obviously working fast enough.
A socio-economic duty aimed at public bodies has knock-on effects for anyone who sells to, insures, or contracts with the public sector. Councils, NHS trusts, police forces and the rest will increasingly be expected to weigh social equity into their "strategic" decisions and procurement decisions are exactly the kind of thing that counts as strategic. This isn't a niche corner of the market either: analysis produced with insurance broker Gallagher and public sector risk network ALARM has estimated that the roughly 400 public bodies in the UK, from parish councils up to county-level authorities, collectively spend in the region of £400 million a year on insurance premiums, with individual contracts often running to £1m–£25m over a five-year term.
Insurers bidding for that public sector risk, or for NHS indemnity work, may increasingly find social mobility credentials creeping into tender criteria the way carbon reporting and modern slavery statements already have — several public bodies are, in fact, already attaching "social value" requirements to insurance and risk contracts, even before any socio-economic duty is switched on.
There's also the small matter of reputational gravity. Once government formally elevates class to sit alongside race and gender in its equality architecture, the "we don't really measure that" excuse gets harder to make in a boardroom. Financial services firms that have spent a decade building gender and ethnicity dashboards may find socio-economic background moving from "nice to have" to "expected," particularly for listed insurers already under pressure from investors on broader ESG disclosure.
None of which is to say the policy is without its critics - plenty of commentators, including some from the political right, have questioned whether "working class" is even a definable category any government department can meaningfully measure, let alone fix with an org chart. Class, unlike a protected characteristic, isn't something you can put a tickbox against with much confidence. Whitehall will presumably spend some time discovering that the hard way.
There is something quietly funny about an industry built almost entirely on assessing risk, pricing probability and demanding evidence before it commits to anything, being told by government that it now needs to take socio-economic background on trust and vibes, because the data infrastructure to measure it properly barely exists yet. Insurers spend their working lives insisting on rigorous underwriting criteria for literally everything else. Perhaps it's poetic justice that the one risk factor genuinely correlated with career outcomes what your dad did for a living when you were fourteen is the one nobody in the sector has quite worked out how to underwrite.
Still, if Whitehall's new unit does even half of what it says on the tin, insurance has an unusually good opportunity here: an industry that already knows it has a class problem, with a trade body that's already collecting some of the relevant data, sitting right in the path of a government initiative that's about to make everyone else start collecting it too. Getting ahead of that, rather than scrambling to catch up once a "socio-economic duty" starts appearing in tender documents, feels like the kind of bet an underwriter would actually take.
