Civil Service: Interns

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her question and for her work in this area. She will be aware that the fast-track internship programme started in 2000 and has had many different iterations, and therefore there are well-established assessment processes in place to make sure that changes work effectively. With regard to how we are doing it, we are adopting this scheme through our test-and-learn approach within the Cabinet Office to make sure that if we do not believe it is working then we will change it. We will be using the criteria that have previously been used, which is why we are using the definition I cited. That is how I can tell your Lordships that in 2022 the internship scheme had people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds at a level of 33% of applications, but that fell to 19.7% and now has fallen even further at this point. We have the data to demonstrate why we need to do this.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the Minister reminding us that the original scheme had a diversity element, which was abolished by the Conservative Government in 2023 in a rather Trumpian attack on the whole idea of diversity. Does the Minister recall that when Oxford and Cambridge introduced similar diversity schemes for children from deprived backgrounds in poorer state schools there was an enormous amount of criticism? I was on the staff of Oxford University at the time and remember being almost physically assaulted. After 30 years, these are widely accepted to have brought a number of extremely bright children from poor backgrounds up into very successful academic, administrative and other careers, and I think this scheme is likely to have the same sort of effect.