Refusing to pay interns can have a detrimental effect on employers’ efforts to attract the best talent, an Employers Forum on Age roundtable has heard.

Delegates at the event held in London this month heard that it was increasingly common for organisations not to pay interns.

Jeremy Day, head of diversity and employee engagement at Sodexo, said: “With graduates so desperate to make their CVs stand out, this practice seems to be spreading.” Delegates named accountancy and law, as well as the arts and the media as sectors where many internships were now unpaid.

However, the head of diversity and inclusion at an international investment bank (who did not wish to be identified) warned that not paying interns reduced applications from people who “could have a positive impact on the organisation”, but couldn’t afford to work for nothing.

“The whole concept of not paying shrinks the pool and we are losing out before we start,” she argued.

Unpaid internships also ran contrary to efforts to reduce the practice of bank employees referring people they knew to the internship programme, who were “comfortably well off”. This in turn was detrimental to the bank’s attempts to widen the diversity of its workforce.

John Carmody, a policy and programme manager at the Department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS), said the government took a “neutral stance” on whether interns should be paid or unpaid. “The government view is that employers should pay interns what they think they are worth,” he said.