Is the civil service an elitist organisation? It depends who you ask. My time as a Fast Streamer has taken me to offices in Salford, Blackpool, Poulton-le-Fylde, Birchwood, Liverpool, Bootle, Birmingham, Nottingham, Newcastle, Manchester and Glasgow. Within these I have met a diverse mix of people, broadly — though not exclusively — representative of the local areas in which they work.
In London, my placements have allowed me to work in ministerial private office and closely with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It’s here diversity quickly dries up, and graduate entrants are plentiful.
The rule of thumb seems to be that, the closer you get to power, the more exclusive the civil service becomes. As an organisation, we seem content to recruit from among the ranks of the poor and those of humble origin, but less content with placing them in important positions.
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Apart from Maurice Hankey — a privately educated officer in the Royal Marines, who effectively invented the role — nobody has ever been appointed to the position of Cabinet Secretary who did not study at the University of Oxford or Cambridge. Such uncomfortable facts must be faced.
Enter the Fast Stream, the Civil Service’s flagship recruitment vehicle. On February 2, an ambitious press notice was issued by the Cabinet Office, endorsed by both the paymaster general and the cabinet secretary. It detailed plans to end inequality in recruitment across the public sector generally, and the Civil Service Fast Stream in particular.
This was in response to the publication of the Bridge Report, an academically rigorous analysis of diversity within the Fast Stream. The report details how great progress has been made on improving gender, ethnic and religious diversity within the Fast Stream. Yet socio-economic diversity has seen little movement for decades. 24% of all university students are said to have come from lower socio-economic backgrounds (SEBs).
"The Fast Stream is not a single, homogenous entity. There are multiple roles under this broad heading"
That same group go on to secure only 4.4% of recommended appointments to the Fast Stream. The report concluded that in this respect “the profile of the [Fast Stream] intake is less diverse than the student population at the University of Oxford”. This chimed with my own impressions, and did not come as a surprise.
Several changes have already been implemented in response to this report. The recruitment procedure for Fast Streamers has been substantially overhauled. The method of collecting data on the socio-economic background of civil servants has been improved. Training in, and appreciation of, unconscious bias is coming to the fore. Yet despite its ambition, the Bridge Report was limited in its scope and omitted entirely from its considerations some key issues.
Before coming to these, I propose two ethical criteria as yardsticks. The first is that diversity provides its own rewards, and is an end in itself. It requires no justification beyond that a fair society demands that the governing reflect the governed.
The second is that “diversity” is taken to mean that every role is equally open to every candidate, regardless of background, with merit (however defined) being the sole determinant in recruitment decisions. This is in line with the legal requirements for the appointment of all civil servants set out in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010.
The Fast Stream is not a single, homogenous entity. There are multiple roles under this broad heading: central departments; parliamentary; diplomatic; science & engineering; commercial; finance; project delivery; communications; economist; economist (diplomatic); statistician; social researcher; operational researcher; digital and technology; human resources; Northern Ireland; European; and European (diplomatic) Fast Streams all coexist.
Each have their own method of recruitment, and provide differential opportunities for further learning. Pay can differ too, as can indirect benefits (the children of diplomats, rightly or wrongly, are eligible to receive substantial private school fees from the exchequer, with generous expense allowances for their parents).
Socio-economic diversity also varies. In three of the past four years for which the Cabinet Office provides data, not a single candidate from lower SEBs has been recommended for appointment to the Northern Ireland Fast Stream, despite hundreds of applications being made from that group.
Statistically, the best performer is the digital and technology profession, which has sourced on average 9.4% of its recommended appointments from lower SEBs over the past four years. The worst performer, by far, is the generalist intake, which encompasses central departments and the diplomatic and Parliamentary Fast Streams.
"If the purpose of the current reforms is to eradicate bias and improve the diversity of the recruitment intake, it seems unusual to have omitted an entire section of the selection process from the scope of research"
Over a four year average, the generalist Fast Stream has managed to sustain only 1.7% of recommended appointments from lower SEB candidates. In 2013, this translated into a mere three appointments (out of 357). The Bridge report headline figure is that 4.4% of successful applicants come from lower SEBs. This is clearly misleading, even if it accurately reflects the Fast Stream as a whole. Some schemes do considerably better. Others do much worse.
Part of the issue is the historic incomparability of data, which allows statisticians, like spin doctors, to conceal the origins and magnitude of the problem. The Fast Stream name has expanded in recent years to cover more and more specialist areas. At its core – both numerically and historically – has always been the generalist policy option.
It attracts by far the highest number of applications, at over 11,000 in 2014, five times as many as the next most popular option. It provides the prime route to the diplomatic service, parliament, private office and beyond.
The Cabinet Office reports that 21% of all “Fast Stream” recommendations for appointment in 2014 were Oxbridge graduates, down from a peak of 35.8% in 2004. Yet if we confine ourselves to the generalist policy branch, 34.3% of all those recommended for appointment in 2014 were Oxbridge graduates.
"Diversity is a goal in itself. That goal demands that all roles must be equally available to all candidates"
The Bridge Report left issues such as this untouched, choosing instead to amalgamate the entire Fast Stream under a single heading, ignoring prejudices that might arise within particular schemes. Other areas not mentioned include the presence of “Final Selection Boards” (“FSBs”), which are used as an additional check on applications to schemes such as parliamentary, diplomatic and digital and technology Fast Streams.
If the purpose of the current reforms is to eradicate bias and improve the diversity of the recruitment intake, it seems unusual to have omitted an entire section of the selection process from the scope of research. There is no mention of FSBs in the entire report. The diplomatic and parliamentary Fast Streams do not publish any statistics relating to the diversity of their intake. I have written to Civil Service Resourcing asking for these statistics. Eight months later, I am yet to receive them, despite assurances to the contrary.
Another untouched area is how candidates are distributed throughout the civil service, once they are appointed. The subjective impression I and several of my colleagues have formed since joining is that those who were privately educated as children tend to be those who find themselves in the most sought-after roles: the grand ministries of state; private office; and leading policy roles. I have asked civil service Resourcing for statistics on this too. Eight months later, I am still waiting.
Diversity is a goal in itself. That goal demands that all roles must be equally available to all candidates. Before we can even begin to work toward that as an organisation, several crucial truths must be faced.
Are we prepared to accept a situation in which some career options within the civil service achieve high levels of diversity, whilst others – such as the diplomatic and central departmental schemes – achieve very little, perhaps even none? It seems like a perversion to claim that we cherish diversity as an organisation, whilst statistics for diversity in some specialisms remain unpublished, with their recruitment practices escaping scrutiny.
If we wish to achieve genuine diversity, we should not distort the depth of the problems or the severity of action needed to rectify them. Without this, we risk creating a two-tier Fast Stream, where some career specialisms are insulated from scrutiny and continue to operate the same recruitment practices which have created such a woeful lack of diversity in the first place.
Disclaimer: I attended the Open University as an undergraduate and the University of Oxford as a postgraduate