Blair calls for radical overhaul of civil service
Tony Blair has called for a dramatic reform of the civil service to drive change.
In a keynote speech, the prime minister urged the ‘Sir Humphreys’ of the civil service to accept radical change or face becoming an “expensive irrelevance”.
In a speech to mark the 150th anniversary of the foundation of the modern civil service, he said that he saw it as his duty to improve the civil service during his time in office.
The prime minister suggested that a civil service which could “adapt, deliver and innovate is a hugely valuable asset”. He added that, “It needs to reward civil servants who look outwards for learning rather than up the hierarchy for approval.”
Mr Blair is determined to see a major shake-up of Whitehall, where many practices have not changed since the Northcote-Trevelyan report which laid the basis of the modern civil service.
The prime minister praised the “enduring” civil service values of integrity and impartiality, but declared that: “The world has changed and the civil service must change with it.”
In a harsh series of proposals, Mr Blair advocated sacking those civil servants in the lowest 20 per cent compared with their peers, encouraging high flyers by moving them into a new High Potential Development Scheme, giving top civil servants four-year contracts and recruiting more civil servants from the private sector.
The prime minister also suggested that Whitehall needed slimming down and specialists needed to replace generalists across the civil service. “If we can get this right there is a double dividend: less unproductive interference in the day-to-day management of public services and more resources freed up for the frontline,” he said.
