Name-blind recruitment for NHS and civil service by 2020

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The announcement by the Cabinet Office follows David Cameron's pledge at October's Conservative party conference to remove bias in recruitment and ensure that jobs are awarded on merit alone, in a bid to remove inequality across the public sector. Cabinet office minister Matthew Hancock also announced a new "inequality index", which will publish the ratio between the salaries of the averagely paid and the highest paid employees in the public sector. Other measures announced included:

• increasing the number of apprenticeships in the public sector to more than 200,000 by 2020, of which at least 30,000 will be in the civil service;
• moving graduate recruitment outside London by establishing regional assessment centres; and
• urging Britain’s major employers to take a similar approach to inequality.

Hancock said: “I want to see a Britain where nobody is defined by the circumstances of their birth. To deliver that, public services need to reflect the country that they serve.” David Cameron announced in October that other graduate recruiters such as KPMG, HSBC, Deloitte, Virgin Money and the BBC would commit to name-blind CVs for all graduate and apprentice roles. Hancock's address came as the Bridge report identified that only 4.4% of successful applicants to the civil service came from the poorest backgrounds. The report found that, although som