Civil Service Recruitment

7. What assessment he has made of the effectiveness of civil service recruitment.

Welcome, Minister.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker.

This Government’s aim is to recruit the brightest and best talent into the civil service—brilliant people from across the UK with the skills to deliver the priorities of the British people. We have already taken steps to improve recruitment, with the first ever cross-Government standardised recruitment processes and benchmarks, to strengthen accountability and bring faster, higher-quality and more inclusive recruitment. Fast, fair, inclusive: that is our recruitment vision.

The Government are restricting applications to the civil service fast stream summer internship programme in favour of those kids who they deem to be from working-class backgrounds. What does the Minister have to say to the children of hard-working nurses, police officers and teachers who will now not get the same opportunities because of decisions made by this Government?

The fast stream programme, of which I am proud to be a graduate, is the No. 1 graduate employee scheme in the country. We are proud that we have had over 70,000 applicants for just 754 appointments. We know that we have done very well in increasing diversity, with applications from ethnic minority candidates, women and people with disabilities, but we are falling short in applications from those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. I make no apologies about taking proactive decisions to ensure that people who do not necessarily have the same social capital or relationship strength as those from other higher social backgrounds can take internships. The number of working-class people in the civil service is three times smaller than the broader UK workforce, and we are taking action on that.

I call the shadow Minister.

Last year, the Government promised us that they were going to slash the size of the civil service, but instead the latest figures showed that the size of the civil service has increased by 7,000 compared with last year. It is not only other Departments that have failed to get a grip: the headcount of the Minister’s own Department is up by 7%. Will the Minister guarantee that when the next set of figures is published, it will show a reduction in the size of the civil service and the size of the Cabinet Office?

Under the last Tory Government, Boris Johnson said that he would cut the number of people employed by the civil service by 91,000, but that figure went up. Jeremy Hunt said that he would cap numbers in the civil service, but they went up. The Conservatives lost control of the civil service, just as they lost control of our borders, our streets and our prisons, but we are taking action to bring those numbers down.

I think that the Minister is missing the fact that she is in Government now and has been for well over a year, but the numbers are going up not down, as they promised. The Minister is correct when she says that the civil service must be able to recruit the brightest and the best, but surely she can see that that is not helped when the most senior civil servant, hand-picked by the Prime Minister barely months ago, faces a barrage of media briefings from within Government. Will the Minister and her Department commission an inquiry into the breach of the code of conduct for special advisers following the personal attacks on the Cabinet Secretary, and will she condemn the vicious media briefings that have clearly come from within No.10?

We have full confidence in the Cabinet Secretary and we condemn all leaks and breaches. We undertake to look into how any leaks from Government take place.