It didn’t surprise anyone that Lord Jones, the larger-than-life former head of the Confederation of British Industry, generated some headlines as he left Whitehall earlier this month. The kind of man who says what he means and means what he says, his entire public career has been marked by candour on subjects close to his heart.

When Jones – along with surgeon Professor Sir Ara Darzi, Admiral Sir Alan West and banker Shriti Vadera – was ennobled and asked to join Gordon Brown’s ‘government of all talents’ in the summer of 2007, there was uproar among some Labour MPs and sections of the press. His right-wing credentials and refusal to join the Labour Party made him the most controversial ‘goat’, as the four new peers were quickly dubbed.

His ministerial tenure was not a long one. In April, he announced his intention to step down as junior minister promoting UK Trade and Investment; and when he left his post ahead of last month’s reshuffle, he gave vent to frustrations that had been building up over his 15 months in government. Lord Jones said he had “never met a more risk-averse system in my entire life than the civil service”, it was reported; civil servants were “very keen on not making mistakes, very keen on supporting the minister, and terrified of the Daily Mail”. He was repeatedly told, he complained, that the reason why things couldn’t be done in a new way was “because we never have done”. A government of all the talents was all very well, Lord Jones said, “but if you bring in independent experts, you don’t expect them to be tethered all the time”.

A few weeks later, Whitehall & Westminster World caught up with Lord Jones to find out what was behind these sensational statements. Why did this goat feel tethered? “I came from the private sector,” he replies. “I am used to a lot of instant responses from people who understand, analyse and then take risks. If people deliver, great. If they don’t, you help them. If they don’t deliver again, you change them. The problem in the civil service is that a great many of them know they cannot be fired.”

Performance management in the civil service has been a recurring theme for the organisation as it attempts to professionalise itself. A recent report by Deloitte, Transfusion: Private to Public, concluded that the day-to-day management of employees is still a problem. The authors spoke with 50 senior civil servants who had recently joined from the private sector, and one of those officials likened the civil service to a “social service”. “It does employ people who are not employable anywhere else,” the anonymous civil servant said.

Lord Jones says his own experience was similar: “These people are not dishonest, they’re not lazy. They’re just not good enough and there is no system to weed them out.” Human dead wood ends up being shunted around Whitehall, usually ending up in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, he claims. This situation, he says, is the product of “hundreds of years of culture”. Lord Jones did meet people working within the system who were hankering for a new way of doing things. The peer describes how one of the senior team welcomed his arrival at the Department for Trade and Industry. “He said: ‘You’re a welcome breathe of fresh air. There are so many civil servants aching for change, and you are someone who can help to bring it’.”

Beyond the criticism, Lord Jones has a lot of good things to say about civil servants – “very honest, decent people who work hard” – and the organisation itself: “the best civil service on Earth”. But, he adds, “it is completely against driving and pushing things forward”, and obsessed by processes to the point where they are seen as more important than the outcome. Nor is there any room for failure, Lord Jones believes. “One civil servant came up to me and said: ‘The problem is you will be gone soon, and I’ve got a career here for 30 years. I don’t want to be held back just because a minister did something silly’.”

The problem, Lord Jones argues, is that bright young, innovative civil servants who are not being rewarded by their department have nowhere else to go. In the private sector they would be snapped up by a competitor, but in the civil service there is not that competition between departments. The British civil service needs to start to emulate the administrations in the USA and France, he says; there, it is not at all unusual for employees to move between the public and private sectors. Then people “would understand more about where they had been working – be it in business, or in health – and their thinking would be more rational. They would also be more rounded people,” says the man who was the CBI’s first ever serving regional chairman to be named director-general.

The peer, who has dropped the Labour whip since the reshuffle and now sits on the cross benches, says the same principle of bringing in outsiders should be applied to the most junior ministerial positions. “We need far more goats,” he says, suggesting that governments should include 10 to 12 non-cabinet ministers who have experience in the relevant area and can be relied on to deliver for a two- to three-year period. This is not just about business, he adds, suggesting that it could include everyone from environmentalists to teachers.

“The country would benefit from having some seriously good ministers who know their subject, don’t want a political career and are not susceptible to the threats or promises by which ministers are controlled. If you are a goat, [these methods of control] have no resonance whatsoever.”

Lord Jones says he is “really looking forward” to being a voice for business in the House of Lords. “There is no constituency for that in Parliament; you get environmental concerns, but business doesn’t get counted”, he says. But couldn’t he do that better inside government? “That is the wonderful misapprehension of the powers of a minister of state,” Lord Jones explains. His role allowed him to travel the world, “banging the drum for the country”, but it did not give him much influence at the very top of government. That’s not a democratic issue about being in the Lords, he says; it’s about the standing and status of ministers, and access to the people at the top.

One of Lord Jones’ biggest headlines as a minister came when he expressed doubts about plans to reform capital gains tax, and he readily admits that going to the newspapers is one way to get noticed – although not one that can be used every day. But junior ministers’ access to their superiors is tightly controlled by officials. “People say there isn’t a great deal of democratic connection with the Lords, but there isn’t a great deal with civil servants and advisers either, and they have a great deal of influence,” he complains. “They are really the gatekeepers of the senior ministers and have a great deal of power.”

Someone of Lord Mandelson’s stature and connections is unlikely to have the same problems getting access the powers that be, and the businessman is warm in his enthusiasm for the new business secretary. “The business community are on side before he starts,” Lord Jones says, calling on Mandelson and his team to get out there and sell the UK to the rest of the world. “People are kind enough to say that I did a good job,” he adds. “That is because I visited 31 different countries; 45 overseas visits in just 18 months. I bothered to get out there, worked with the ambassadors and made business for the UK. I want to see the new ministers on a plane abroad at least twice a month.”

From the goat’s mouth

On Labour, the unions, and public sector pensions
“I have not witnessed a greater, more depressing, irritating example of craven surrender from the government to their union paymasters than when ministers said: ‘If you are in the public sector you can retire at 60, but if you are in the private sector you retire at 68 so that your taxes can go to pay for those retiring early in the public sector.’ Disgraceful.”

On business
“If it wasn’t for the wealth that business creates in the first place, there would be no tax and we wouldn’t have a single school, we wouldn’t have an army or a navy and we wouldn’t have a prison, an airport or a railway. That point is so often forgotten, especially by politicians and journalists, by teachers and trade unionists.”

On the civil service
“Yes, Minister – remember that? It wasn’t a comedy, it was a training film!”

On risk
“We are fast becoming a world where we lie to people and tell them risk doesn’t exist. Don’t play conkers in the playground, love, you might get hurt. Don’t do backstroke in the swimming pool, you might bang into somebody.”