National Audit Office chief Amyas Morse has urged senior civil servants to develop their skills in business planning and organisational change, arguing that the civil service cannot depend on outside expertise if it’s to successfully pursue reform.

Asked by CSW to identify the “pinch points” that might inhibit organisational change in the civil service, Morse emphasised the need to “understand something about having a business strategy: that’s different from policy generation.”

“People who are career civil servants should see this as part of their core skill set,” Morse argued. Civil servants should dump the idea that they’d “rather be writing policy”, he said, and say to themselves: “I’d rather be learning to implement major change and how to move complex organisations forward. I regard that as just as intellectually satisfying.”

Asked whether more external recruitment might be required to bring in the right skills for business change, Morse argued strongly that the reform agenda won’t work unless it’s led by career civil servants. “This way of running things needs to be metabolised by the civil service, taken into the civil service’s central culture, and led by the civil service,” he said.

“The civil service has a very powerful culture, and if it’s leading this it will really work,” he continued. “There’s no reason, considering the talent and intellect in the civil service, why it shouldn’t lead this change and put itself in possession of it, rather than having a lot of outside people coming in to show us what to do.”

Where external recruits are brought in to plug skills gaps, Morse said, “you must squeeze their expertise out of them and transfer it into the people who are permanently going to be running things.”

Read the full interview here.

Written by Matt Ross, CSW