Government needs to treat charities with more respect, the head of Barnardo’s has told an audience at Civil Service Live.

Martin Narey, who joined the children’s charity after spells in charge of both the Prison Service and the National Offender Management Service, said that all too often charity bosses such as himself are contacted for consultations at short notice, or left waiting to meet ministers.

He gave the example of being invited to a meeting with a junior minister with just two days notice, and no flexibility on the time. “You have to understand that you are not the only busy people in the world, and you assume that if you use the magic words, ‘the minister is running late’, everything will be okay.”

During his time as a senior civil servant, he admitted to regularly keeping appointments waiting, but said the practice was unfair and self-centred. “I often kept people waiting for 45 minutes to see me – but that never happens in the business world.”

Though he said that many stakeholder meetings with ministers and officials are a waste of charity bosses’ time, he paid tribute to those held by Department for Work and Pensions permanent secretary Sir Leigh Lewis. “He’s meticulous about time keeping and all his senior people turn up, so it is worth going.”

Narey added that advice from the third sector is frequently only sought after a policy decision has already been made or a serious incident has occurred. “For three years before ‘Baby P’ happened. I’d been raising concerns about the extent to which we leave children with damaging families.”

Also at the session was another children’s charity boss, Claire Tickell, head of Action for Children. Both Barnado’s and Action for Children run a wide range of children’s services for central and local government, and have a joint paid workforce of around 16,000 employees, with many thousands more volunteers.

Tickell said both organisations wanted to have better relationships with central government, and called for improvements in the system of secondments between departments and the third sector.

Earlier in the day, the Cabinet Office’s top official on charity policy said the government had just completed the biggest ever survey of opinions within the voluntary sector.

Campbell Robb, director of the Office of the Third Sector, said the government wanted to encourage a “dialogue” between charities and departments and had even spent around £1m on developing better mechanisms encouraging them to complain about government policy.