Delegates at the first day of Civil Service Live were a little subdued: they had heard about Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude’s plans to introduce rather drastic changes to redundancy payments, and awaited his speech with a sort of fascinated dread. When he spoke in the afternoon, people who couldn’t get into the room crowded by the door and pressed their ears up against thin partition walls to hear his plans for their future.

But today there is a different air, perhaps because we began in the opening plenary with a call to arms from Sir Gus O’Donnell. He urged civil servants to take a more positive view of the efficiency agenda: submit ideas to the Spending Challenge; keep pushing on innovation. Ian Watmore, chief operating officer of the Efficiency and Reform Group, also sought to boost morale. Systems in the civil service are old fashioned, he said, but he prefaced that by heaping praise on civil servants themselves.

Sir Gus urged delegates to visit the Spending Challenge stand at Civil Service Live (on the ground floor, for those of you visiting) So I did, and each time I’ve walked past the stand there has been a small crowd milling around reading or adding to the walls of ideas.
 

Some ideas, scribbled on brightly coloured paper which makes the stand look a bit like a modern art exhibition, are rather more political than you might  expect from civil servants: a couple suggest not replacing Trident; one calls for government to stop fighting “unnecessary, costly and unsustainable wars”.

Others seem more personal: a suggestion to stop carrying dead wood and remove rather than promote incompetent people is a valid concern but could hint at some personal slight, as could another bemoaning the lack of opportunities for experienced civil servants compared to “degree laden fast streamers”?

Creating a central HR department, or similar shared-services style ideas crop up many times and there are others that talk about reducing duplication. Do we need the Civil Service Appeal Board given we have the Employment Tribunal, for example?
 

Clearly there is a real enthusiasm for this: 40,000 ideas and counting have been submitted to the Spending Challenge website. But there’s also a great deal of uncertainty and even anger: in the opening plenary one audience member asked Watmore and O’Donnell what they’d be doing to stop civil servant bashing in the media and another suggested that banks and rich tax-dodgers should be doing more to help to reduce the country’s deficit.

 
Keeping these civil servants – and wider public sector workers – motivated amid this anger and uncertainty will be a real challenge for managers. The Spending Challenge is certainly a positive attempt to harness the experience and creativity of those delivering policy and services, but it is also a canny way to spin the massive budget cuts as a positive opportunity for public servants to be heard; perhaps the Conservatives would say: to be empowered.

Judging from the chatter around the Spending Challenge stand, it is generating positive feeling, but amid all these ideas, one brought home the underlying mood, and the long way ministers have to go before their battle to win public sector hearts and minds is done. It simply read: “Stop picking on civil servants: it’s not our fault”.