Details of the gap between highly paid managers and staff on average wages are to be published across the Civil Service under plans being set out by the Government to tackle inequality in the public sector.
It will also announce moves to tackle unconscious bias against potential recruits from ethnic minority backgrounds by introducing “name-blind” application forms for jobs in the Civil Service and the National Health Service.
Matthew Hancock, the Cabinet Office minister, will say the Government is determined to end inequality in taxpayer-funded jobs, insisting that people’s chances of success should not be determined by where they were born.
It comes after a Civil Service report found that only 4.4 per cent of successful applicants to its elite “fast stream” graduate programme came from working-class backgrounds.
Mr Hancock will urge major employers to follow the Civil Service’s lead in tackling the lack of social mobility by recruiting from a wider pool of applicants.
The Government is to publish the pay ratio between the average- and highest-paid employees in Civil Service departments. The new “inequality index” will allow taxpayers to hold ministers to account.
Interviews for graduate jobs in the Civil Service will be conducted outside London at a regional assessment centre. And non-graduate routes to senior public-sector jobs will be established by the creation of 200,000 apprenticeships, including 30,000 in the Civil Service.
Anonymised application forms will be introduced in the Civil Service and NHS following evidence that applicants from ethnic minorities suffer discrimination. David Cameron told the Conservative conference last year of a black woman who had to change her name to Elizabeth to secure a job interview. He said: “You can’t have true opportunity without real equality.”
Sir Jeremy Heywood, head of the Civil Service, said: “The Civil Service has made great strides in the last few years on diversity, but there is still more to do if it is properly to represent modern Britain.”
