Unpaid Internships

Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts

Tuesday 18th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Hazel Blears]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her intervention and also for taking one of our Speaker’s scheme interns, who has flourished. I know that she has given that young person a great deal of personal development time.

The hon. Lady makes a good point: it is up to everyone to make the most of their connections. The difficulty is that some people come with ready-made connections, and some find things more of a struggle. That is relevant not just to professions, but to anyone getting their next job. When we set up the future jobs fund there was a statistic that I found amazing, which was that seven out of 10 people get their next job from someone they know; only one or two get it from the jobcentre. Whether someone wants to be a plasterer or a joiner, it is about having wider connections and knowing some people. We are trying to give people the incentive and ability to make connections. It is far less likely that someone from a poorer background will know a lawyer or doctor or member of a similar profession. Therefore, it is much more difficult for such people to make those connections.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend has given a great account of her work. She mentioned the future jobs fund, and we have been talking about the dependence of the creative industries on unpaid interns. I was privileged to see how a network of creative businesses in London, from the Royal Opera House to the National Portrait Gallery and others, used the future jobs fund to establish a paid internship—they called the interns apprentices, although they were not full apprentices—sharing the learning between those different companies. They brought those young people in from the jobcentre, and they flourished. Those same young people then put on a jobs fair for others like them, to look at how they could get into those industries. When an opening is given to the less standard young people, they open the doors to others.

[Hazel Blears]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, with her characteristic optimism and belief in the future, which is what the debate is all about—a belief that young people’s talent and skills can make a difference. Often, particularly in the creative industries, people take a different slant on life because they have not come from a traditional background; and then the best music and drama happen. The role of the arts is to challenge people’s perceptions; so why not have young people in there, who are the best at challenging many of us whose views have become perhaps a little established? My hon. Friend makes a fantastic point, and I am reminded again of Martin Bright’s organisation, which did a huge amount with the future jobs fund. With so many young people unemployed, it is sometimes said that it is difficult to find the money to support people. However, if we do not, we shall lose a generation of talent, and the country cannot afford that.

I wonder if I might make a little progress with my speech now, although I am grateful for the interventions of hon. Members, many of whom, I know, are not able to stay for the whole debate. It has been helpful to hear their different points of view. I want to give not boring statistics but a few bits of evidence, now that we have heard about the principles of the debate. A couple of surveys have been carried out recently. One was for the European Youth Forum, and it painted a pretty depressing picture, in which just over half of all the interns surveyed had been paid at all; 41% of those who received some money found that their remuneration was insufficient to cover day-to-day living expenses; and in total a quarter were able to make ends meet. Nearly two thirds relied on financial support from their parents.

In another poll conducted by Survation for Unions21, 84% of people over 35 said that a young person in their family could not afford to do an unpaid internship in London. That is a massive exclusion barrier. The culture of unpaid internships is now so widespread that many young people no longer think about applying because they know that they will not be able to meet their living costs during the internship. Young people who have played by the rules, worked hard at school and taken on thousands of pounds of debt to get a degree are finding themselves cast aside in a career market that now often values experience over qualifications. Alan Milburn reported in March 2012 that more than 30% of newly hired graduates had previously interned for their employer, with that figure rising to 50% in some sectors, so unless someone has their foot in the door, it is very unlikely that they will be able to get a full-time job.

Many jobs are offered on the basis of whom people know, rather than what they know, which immediately puts people from families that do not have a background in a particular area at a disadvantage. It is interesting to see the controversy that has recently surrounded the appointment of the Government’s new social mobility tsar, James Caan. I welcome his appointment, but on the day he was appointed there was a story about him employing his two daughters. He said that his daughters had worked in other industries, that they had shown their worth and that they could therefore make a great contribution to his company, but the eruption of that furore shows how such things go to the heart of people’s sense of unfairness. People will always want to help their children because that is a natural instinct, but I ask employers and business people such as the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster to think twice; excluding people who deserve a chance will damage their business because they are not accessing the talent pool. I hope that in his new position Mr Caan will be able, from his own personal experience, to be a good advocate and ambassador for opening the field to people beyond family members, thereby ensuring that the wider field of talent is drawn in. I hope to meet him fairly soon, and I am sure we will have an excellent discussion about what he can do in his role.

There have been a couple of examples of parents being able to bid in auctions for unpaid internships for their family, which is pretty shocking. The Guardian recently reported that parents at Westminster school, which is a private school with pretty high fees, bid more than £650 for a mini-pupillage with a criminal barrister—[Laughter.] Perhaps I should say a barrister in criminal practice. Such auctions fly in the face of aspiration and social mobility.