Big Society 'faces civil service barriers'

The PASC’s report, Change in government: the agenda for leadership, published on September 22, says: ‘The government has not got a change programme. Ministers just want change to happen, but without a plan, change will be defeated by inertia.’

The committee said the twin policies of the Big Society and localism demanded ‘a more transparent and flexible civil service with a new role of commissioning public services from charities, social enterprises, mutuals and private companies’.

But Whitehall lacked these skills and little effort had been made to equip civil servants with them, the MPs found.

Government had ‘failed to recognise the scale of reform required,’ the report said.

‘As a result, key policies like the Big Society agenda and decentralisation will fail.’

The committee called for the establishment of a corporate centre led by someone ‘with the authority to insist on delivery across the civil service’.

MPs also found ‘a wealth of evidence’ that Whitehall departments lacked expertise and specialist knowledge and did not have ‘the confidence to make decisions and implement them quickly’, while the government’s approach to tackling this skill shortage ‘falls short of what is urgently required’.

Committee chair Bernard Jenkin said change should be driven by Whitehall’s top management but ‘this only appears to be happening in very few departments’ with no machinery to pass on their experience to weaker departments.

He complained that civil servants' usual response to change was that, ‘they keep their heads down until the latest reform has passed over, and then carry on as before’.

A Cabinet Office spokesman said: ‘We are working with departments to make the civil service smaller, flatter, more fluid and integrated, more entrepreneurial and innovative, with stronger professional and commercial skills and more rigorous performance management.’