A class act

The civil service is to introduce a new question for job applicants, asking them whether they think that they come from a lower socio-economic background.

Of course the popular image of a civil servant is a bowler-hatted, rolled-up umbrella-wielding Sir Humphrey strolling along Whitehall with a copy of The Times under his arm, but in reality the term spans a huge spectrum, from the relatively small ranks of senior civil servants with their high pay and pensions to a far larger number of junior ones earning not much more than the minimum wage.

I worked in the administrative grades of the civil service for just over ten years, from the beginning of 1997 to the end of 2007, in what was first the Department of Social Security and then Department for Work and Pensions, and was also a trade union activist, briefly in the admin grade CPSA and then, following a merger with another union, the current, multigrade, union, PCS.

I'm not sure what I would have answered to the question, probably "No", but that's one of the problems with this idea: most people, whether they are rich or poor, think of themselves as average, because that is their and their friends' and family's experience, and because they wrongly estimate (poor people slightly underestimating and rich people wildly overestimating) what an average income actually is. There is also the problem of non-manual workers, some of them low-paid, seeing themselves as middle-class because they wrongly associate being working class with manual labour.

I'm also not sure what the civil service intends to do with the data. Two long-term studies, Whitehall I and II, have linked pay inequality and lack of job control in the civil service with a reduced life expectancy amongst lower-grade workers, and at the other end of the scale the Fast Stream graduate entry scheme continues to channel a disproportionate number of white, privately-educated men from elite universities into the top jobs rather than promoting people within departments.