Sir Keir Starmer’s former chief of employees Baroness Sue Grey has challenged the federal government’s plan to restrict a civil service internship scheme to working-class college students.
The Labour peer questioned the “proof base” behind last month’s decision to restrict a Whitehall internship to college students from “decrease socio-economic backgrounds”.
The federal government argued the change will herald “extra working-class younger individuals” widening the expertise pool for a civil service that can “really mirror the nation”.
However Baroness Grey instructed friends she was “from probably the most working class of backgrounds” however had “discovered loads from being round individuals from completely different walks of life”.
From October 2026, Whitehall’s essential internship scheme designed to draw college college students to the civil service will now solely be obtainable for college kids from “decrease socio-economic backgrounds” – judged by what jobs their dad and mom did after they have been 14.
Those that are profitable on the internship will then be prioritised for entry to the Quick Stream, the principle graduate programme for entry to the civil service.
However Baroness Grey stated: “As a former civil servant from probably the most working class of backgrounds, and I am certain there are superb intentions right here, I’d have discovered it actually tough after I joined the civil service to not have a wider group that I truly was uncovered to, and I discovered a lot from that.
“I want to know what the proof base is for truly reaching this conclusion, as a result of I do assume it is good intentioned, however I believe there are different ways in which the civil service may be opened up as effectively.”
Labour minister Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent stated this was one of many “uncommon” events she “disagreed” with Baroness Grey.
“This isn’t about stopping the civil service being a meritocracy. It’s making certain that the meritocracy is obtainable to everybody, no matter the place you have been born,” she stated
Earlier, Tory shadow Cupboard Workplace minister Baroness Finn identified that the present guidelines made clear an individual’s choice for work within the civil service “have to be on advantage on the idea of truthful and open competitors”.
She stated: “The adjustments proposed by the federal government to the summer time internship programme would enable the kid of a mechanic, an electrician and even probably a toolmaker to use, however discriminate towards the kid of a roofer, a taxi driver or a nurse, who can be deemed ineligible.
“Fairly aside from dramatically lowering the vary of expertise, does she actually imagine that that is nonetheless a good and open and certainly a smart course of?”
Baroness Grey, the daughter of Irish immigrants in Nineteen Fifties Tottenham, grew up with a salesman father and a barmaid mom.
She joined the civil service straight from faculty after her father died when she was a teen.
She turned a family title because the Partygate investigator, and her important report into Downing Avenue lockdown gatherings contributed to Boris Johnson’s downfall in 2022.
She was poached from the civil service by Labour to guide Sir Keir Starmer’s workplace because the social gathering ready for presidency forward of the 2024 election, however infighting pressured her out inside 100 days of victory.
Since becoming a member of the Home of Lords she has used her speeches to warn about proposed cuts to the civil service, criticising those who call public servants “pen pushers”.
Making her maiden speech within the Home of Lords, Baroness Grey stated that the UK wants “public servants to succeed”.
