This mess of an intern system

By Lisa Nandy MP

This week I had an intern start in my office. Like many of the young people who write to me and ask for an interning opportunity she has just graduated and is really excellent, but is finding it hard to get a job without any experience. Helping young people like this spend a few weeks in an office environment, exploring their interests, with a reference at the end is surely one of the things an MP should try to provide? Yet parliament is notorious for its reputation for exploiting bright young people desperate to break into the political world by using them as unpaid staff, and – as the campaign group Intern Aware point out – I was keen to make sure that she didn’t have to starve to get a month’s work experience.

So I was startled to discover that under the new expenses scheme I can only fund an intern from the staffing allowance if I give them an employment contract. This means that I would have to employ them to do a specific paid job with an official job description and defined pay scales which I simply cannot afford out of my current staffing budget and that new graduates with no experience would find it hard to qualify for – let alone young people without a degree.

The only alternative, suggested by IPSA who run the new expenses regime, was not to pay interns at all – not even expenses – or to fund their hotel, train and living costs out of my salary. Luckily my new intern has somewhere to stay in London, and once accommodation is taken care of I can afford the rest. But I find it scandalous that young people from my Wigan constituency who don’t have the right combination of luck, money and connections can’t come and intern for more than a few days because of the cost of London hotels and train fares.

We seem to have written an already-rotten system into the new rules so that only young people who are well connected, wealthy or from London can come and get the experience they need and a sense of how politics works. We are excluding exactly the young people we should be encouraging. Seeing how Parliament works first-hand can make the difference between having the courage and confidence to stand for election and not.

There has rightly been much debate already about the lack of diversity in the Commons; I know that the staff trade union have campaigned on this for some years, advocating a central diversity fund that MPs could draw on to give disadvantaged young people from their constituencies opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have. I am currently working with local businesses in Wigan to set up a fund that will allow local young people to come and spend some time in Parliament but I fear that unless the authorities think again, we will still be having this debate in 20 years time.

It’s a shame because it seems that young people are joining the Labour Party in droves. In my CLP we have an astonishing number of new young members who are pitching in already. This week I met with some of the unions to talk about how to build a left-wing movement both nationally and in my constituency. One of the first things I am doing is hosting the Labour leadership candidates in Wigan so party members and supporters can come along and debate with them. Ed Miliband was the first to offer and is coming on Friday. So far, half of the people who have said they are attending are under 25. It bodes well for the future of politics – but not if we don’t sort out this mess of an intern system.