Whitehall needs fresh talent at every level

Experienced private sector staff could play a vital role in bridging the Civil Service's long-standing skills gap

The civil service now employs 418,300 people (Getty)

Why should we, as members of the public, care about the way the Civil Service recruits, trains and fosters staff brought in from the private sector?

In fact why does the Civil Service, which employs most of its people directly from school or university, need to hire expensive executives from outside the organisation at all?

The answer to both these questions can be summed up in one rather euphemistic word: “Delivery”. Delivery is ensuring that roads, schools, hospitals and aircraft carriers get built on time and on budget.

Delivery is ensuring that the tax and benefit systems are simple to understand and easy to access. Delivery is making sure every pound we give the Government in taxes is reasonably well spent and not wasted on IT projects costing billions that never do what they were intended to.

And delivery is what the Civil Service has never been very good at.

The truth is that, in the past, the skills required to rise up the ranks in Whitehall were devising policies on paper, dealing with ministers and getting laws passed through Parliament, with little thought as to what happened afterwards.

There is now a recognition that this must change. But there is a long-standing skills gap which needs to be bridged and that is where the private sector, which has more experience of project management and expenditure controls, comes in. Ministers in the last government, to their credit, recognised this and attempted to address the skills shortage by hiring externally for a number of senior positions in Whitehall, to change the culture from the top while introducing training at the bottom.

But, as the report today highlights, they have not been entirely successful. Part of the Civil Service appears intent on delivering “tissue rejection”, and this must not be allowed to happen.

The Civil Service should be actively recruiting and fostering external talent at all levels – while encouraging fast-stream graduates to go off and get experience of the private sector.

It should be an organisation that is dynamic, open to new ideas and which judges success by what happens on the ground and not in Whitehall.

This, of course, is easier said than done. But at the moment there appears to be an awful lot of saying and very little “delivery”.