The way that mobility has been politicised in speeches and documents prompts the question: from where did their incorrect notions and inaccurate definitions come? This is not an easy question to answer. There are no publicly available records of who decided what, why and when. If elite or key informant interviews were now possible, the prospect of achieving complete and accurate recall of events during more than a decade of drafting these papers would still be remote. The process behind acquiring and adapting ideas for policy is not open to inspection; because ready access to the people involved is not available, the text of published documents has to be relied upon. Even then an added degree of uncertainty comes from limits to how far textual analysis can take us, because the referencing standards of the documents is so poor that tracking origins and influences is difficult.

Incorrect definitions and lack of attention to research data assumed importance partly because of the sparsity of mobility studies. After the flourish of work in the 1970s, there were no new national sample surveys of UK mobility for three decades (other than spinoffs from the quinquennial British Election Surveys up to 1997 and Paterson and Iannelli's (2007) work on Scotland). This was probably because of a sense that mobility had been ‘done’, together with concerns about the high cost of major programmes of research. This left a data vacuum, which was only partly filled by reanalysis of older longitudinal datasets. Thus documents that did respect definitions and research findings had relatively few sources on which to draw – such as the National Equality Panel report on economic inequalities, which quoted only six research studies (Hill et al 2010, 319–29) – and were otherwise dependent on the recycling of earlier documents:

Although the National Equality Panel report was not widely taken up in debates about mobility, it typifies the somewhat incestuous approach of re-cycling other summaries of mobility discussed in the last chapter.