Well, not the actual Tories, but their representatives in the blogosphere. Conservative Home runs a regular feature where they highlight public appointments being made and invites their appropriately qualified readers to apply.

ConHome uses the Cabinet Office’s Public Appointments page as a reference point. It’s currently advertising 48 vacancies from members of independent monitoring boards in prisons, to Cotswolds and Chilterns members of the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty conservation boards, members of the Commission on Human Medicine (with backgrounds in geriatric medicine, toxicology and nursing), gambling commissioners and a non executive director of the Health and Safety Executive. You can register on the site to receive regular updates of positions as they become available.

There are also sites for public appointments in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland and the latter even has a Twitter account.

Vacancy: Member of the board x 4 – Education in #Education visit: https://t.co/adYAYAvji6 #NED via @nonexecs

— NonExecDirectors (@nonexecs) October 30, 2015

There is a Commissioner for Public Appointments who produces an annual report. Coincidentally, this year’s was published this week. It sets out some issues of concern – lack of resources hampering the effectiveness of appointments processes, for example. He also states that public confidence in the appointments system is fragile:

It only takes a few examples of bad recruitment practice or of Ministers appointing political supporters to key roles to reignite the widespread public scepticism about public appointments, which the Nolan Committee perceived twenty years ago. As this report shows, there is cause for concern in a number of areas of current practice, which, if not checked, will put some of the progress of recent years into reverse.

The report also makes some observations on diversity and highlights the last Governemnt’s (that’ll be you, Lynne Featherstone and Jo Swinson) progress on gender equality. Now over 45% of these appointments are going to women, but more needs to be done:

Secondly, much more attention needs to be given to the diversity of the candidate field. As this report shows there has been excellent progress in appointing women to boards over the last five years, a tribute to the way the last Government energised the whole system to improve gender diversity.

However, overwhelmingly, those being appointed to boards are still more likely to be white, able-bodied and older. There needs to be a concerted attempt to widen the intake, to attract some younger people to public roles and to draw in different types of experience from the norm. There is an urgent need to remove the barriers which currently discourage those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds from applying for public roles and to understand what is stopping them from progressing in the competition, when they do apply. All this requires more than a bit of tinkering with role descriptions and advertising to a wider network of people, although that may also be helpful. Instead it calls for serious succession planning over a three to five year period. It means thinking much more widely about the kind of skills and experience, which boards need to reflect the public they serve; accepting that not everyone on a board needs to have been senior in the private sector; and that challenge and insight can come from many different quarters and backgrounds.

So, we’ll be keeping an eye on public appointments in the future as many of our readers may well be suited to positions being advertised.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social