Imagine the following exchange between a bright young student and a Civil Service recruiter.
“Hello, I’m passionate about social care and would love to be an intern at the Department of Health”
“Great, but what do your parents do?”
“One is a doctor and the other runs a dementia charity”
“Sorry, you’re not working class enough…”
Sounds crazy, right? But then this is the headline from on actual story on the BBC “Civil service interns must all be working class, government says“.
The details are just as bad. According to the official press release, the Summer Internship Programme will now be limited to “working class students” from “lower-income backgrounds”.
Participants who perform well will even be “fast-tracked to the final stages of the Fast Stream selection process if they decide to apply for a job after graduation”.
There are two obvious problems with this.
The first is a basic point of principle. Candidates should simply be selected on merit. Instead, internships will now be used as a tool for what might charitably be called “social engineering”, but which reeks instead of petty class politics.
The second point is more practical. It has been reported that whether you are sufficiently “working class” will depend on the job that your father had when you were 14.
This will inevitably lead to some odd distinctions. For example, is the child of a train driver “working class”, or from a “lower-income background”, even if they earn as much as £77,000 a year?
Or what if your father was merely a humble “toolmaker”, like Keir Starmer’s, but your mother is a City high-flyer?
And of course, the Government has consistently struggled to define what “working people” means in other contexts, notably when setting taxes and benefits.
There is a third, less obvious problem too – even if you are a fan of initiatives to encourage Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).
In focusing solely on “working class” students, the Government appears to be setting up a program which is actually more restrictive than the previous “Summer Diversity Internship Scheme”. This is because this earlier scheme, which was replaced in 2023 with a more general internship programme, also favoured ethnic minorities and the disabled.
To be fair, many private sector employers and professional bodies offer similar schemes. People from lower-income backgrounds can indeed be at a disadvantage when seeking internships, either because they cannot afford to work for nothing (or for very little), or because they lack the family connections. This is a genuine problem.
But these private sector schemes are typically on top of existing programmes which are open to all, rather than the only form of internship on offer.
It is also right to acknowledge that some groups are under-represented across the Civil Service, though this applies to certain ethnic minorities as well as those from poorer backgrounds.
But it would be far better to address this problem by looking at the reasons why these candidates might be less willing or able to apply for internships, and for the Fast Stream more generally.
For example, this could be tackled by better marketing and outreach programmes, or offering more financial support to interns on lower incomes.
The Civil Service also already offers a wide variety of apprenticeships, up to and including degree level, which are available to all but might be especially suitable for those from pooter backgrounds.
Instead, the Government has opted for the clumsiest possible approach – by actively discriminating against anyone whose father happened to be in the “wrong” job. This is a big step backwards.
Plain-speaking Economics 