Unpaid Work Experience (Prohibition) Bill [HL]

Baroness Wyld Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 27th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wyld (Con)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, on the Bill, on his brilliant speech and on the tenacity and passion he has shown in driving this campaign. This is only my second time speaking in this Chamber, and it is truly inspiring to have the chance to speak up on an issue that has long been close to my heart. I declare my interests as set out in the register. I am a council member of the Institute of Directors but I am expressing a purely personal view in this debate.

In my maiden speech, I spoke briefly about my background growing up in Newcastle upon Tyne and then coming to London almost 20 years ago to start my first job. I remember all too well the mix of fear and excitement. I had gone to Cambridge University from a comprehensive school in Newcastle and had a fantastic time at university, so much so that it was not until I started to think about what I might do next that I realised there was a whole other world out there—the world of contacts. My family did not have a black book of contacts, or at least none who worked in business, media, politics, publishing or the arts, and I did not know a soul in London, and that is where you were inevitably directed by careers advisers, as if there was no other city in the UK.

When we all left Cambridge, genuinely kind and well-meaning friends told me to lodge with a family friend and get work experience through a contact. By this point, I was completely baffled, so I applied for a range of bottom-rung administrative jobs and was fortunate that I landed myself a temporary role in the City on what was fair but low pay. This was before the minimum wage, but it was a fair wage and would have served me well if, indeed, I had had a friend’s sofa to sleep on. As it was, after I had paid my rent, bills and transport, I was overdrawn again, month after month, by the second day of each month.

I am standing here today, so clearly life has not treated me too badly. I have been very fortunate and have gone on to have a series of very fair and inspiring employers. But I have never forgotten the anxiety and, at times, the despair of my early 20s as a single woman in London, wanting to stand on my own two feet and make my family proud. Many times I felt that I would simply have to give up and go home. That would not have been the end of the world, as I had a loving and supportive family, but it was not the independent life I had been brought up to believe could be mine.

Mine is not a story of injustice—I have been privileged—but it is intended to illustrate how hard it is to go just from a standing start. That is why it horrifies me to see that nearly 20 years later, many young people do not even get a fair start. What message are we sending out about the sort of society we want to be? I was talking to a woman in her 20s recently, and what really depressed me about the conversation was just the sense of resignation. She told me, “While we were doing our degrees we were encouraged to get work experience or internships when we finished. These were almost always unpaid, and there are countless stories of organisations that have people coming through in rolling three-month slots for no pay”. She said, “To be honest, people are so desperate to get names for their CVs that often they don’t push for pay, because they know there is someone else more privileged who will be able to do it for free.” One of my closest friends is a teacher at a comprehensive in north Manchester, and when I talk to her, she says that many of her very bright year 12s just could not even begin to contemplate the idea for working for free in the future on the vague promise of something better, so they are effectively locked out of many of the sectors that would benefit so much from their talent.

I applaud the naming and shaming that organisations such as Intern Aware have done, and indeed those individuals who blew the whistle on these practices, but as other noble Lords have said, it is hard to call out any bad behaviour at the very start of your career, when all your energy goes into impressing people. Some say that the law is clear enough on this issue, and it is of course the case that many businesses and organisations do the right thing, but unpaid internships are still an open secret. A fair day’s work must equal a fair day’s pay. I know the Government have looked at this issue before, and having worked in business for much of my career I fully understand the importance of ensuring we keep as flexible an environment as possible. For me, this Bill strikes the right balance: it is proportionate and will still allow for ad-hoc work experience for a limited period.

We cannot just pay lip service to the need to bring people from all backgrounds into the professions that are still too much the preserve of the already privileged and/or London-based. I talked about coming to London as if it were the only route to a career, and at the time, that was the only narrative I had heard. All of us who feel passionately about this need to help think of more creative ways to open up every sector to talented individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds from an early age, wherever they live.

One thing that struck me recently was the Social Mobility Foundation’s one-for-one campaign, which says to employers in different sectors that if they are planning to offer a short stint of work experience to a school-age contact, they should match it with a placement to someone from a disadvantaged background. We could all think about different ways that this could be done in organisations we are associated with. These kids do not usually have day-to-day exposure to professionals, and this inevitably has a knock-on effect on their confidence. We want them to be hammering on the door, ready to start their careers in fairly paid jobs when they finish their education, whenever and wherever that is. It would be a strange organisation that did not want access to the best talent, so if employers do not find ways to open the door to people from every socioeconomic background, from every city, every town and every village in the UK, everybody loses.

Over the years, when I have talked about these sorts of issues, I have been told in private conversations by people of every political persuasion and of none that I do not want to risk appearing “chippy”. This is not a matter of class envy, though; all the young people I meet, regardless of their backgrounds, want to stand on their own two feet, earn their own living and feel that they earned their role because of their talent, not because of who their parents are. For their sake, and for the future prosperity of the UK, we owe them the chance to do so. It is on that basis that I am pleased to support the Bill.