Professor Paul Gregg

Professor of Economic and Social Policy

Paul Gregg is widely recognised as one of Britain's leading authorities on youth unemployment, jobless households, social mobility and broader labour market performance.

As such he is not only a highly published academic but also extensively involved on policy development in these areas. He was recently appointed to the government’s new statutory Commission on Child Poverty and Social Mobility, which is chaired by Alan Milburn the former Labour Cabinet Minister. He is also a member of Labour’s Youth Unemployment Taskforce (which brings together Local Authorities in Britain’s major cities to develop policy and spread best practice) and was recently a member of the ACEVO Commission on Youth Unemployment (chaired by David Miliband MP) and Birmingham’s Commission on Youth Unemployment. 

Paul was formerly a member of the Council of Economic Advisors at HM Treasury (from 1997 to 2005) where he worked on the New Deal programmes to help the unemployed and lone parents into work, child poverty and tax credits.

Paul Gregg’s early research focused on the effects of trade unions on wages and productivity but from the early 1990s his research has been on employment and unemployment and in particular he explored how employment was polarising across households at that time, with more no earner and two earner families. Previously employment had only been considered at an individual level. This research has led UK governments, the EU and many other countries to develop statistics on household employment patterns.

One of the key insights of this research was how growing numbers of jobless families with children and the role this played in growing extent of child poverty in the 1980s and 90s. The UK until recently had the highest proportion of children growing up in jobless families in the EU, despite far higher than average levels of employment. This excess of jobless families (given employment levels) peaked in 1996 and has been a major driver of a policy focus on reducing the numbers of jobless families.

In part stimulated by this, Paul extended his research into looking at the life chances of poor children and intergenerational socio-economic mobility (commonly referred to as social mobility, which measures the extent to which peoples adult economic outcomes map onto their childhood origins). This research area had dropped off of the policy radar until the work of new research in the early 2000s by Gregg and colleagues. The findings that the UK had low levels of intergenerational mobility compared to other European countries and that the extent of mobility had fallen between children born in 1960 and 1980. Social mobility has subsequently made a hugely increased subject of academic research and policy thinking. With Nick Clegg arguing that ‘social mobility is the principal goal of the government’s social policy’.