If the first few minutes of interviewing Amyas Morse are anything to go by, the National Audit Office (NAO) is in for quite a change of style. The body’s new chief executive – the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG), to give him his full title – turned the tables and forced the photographer to be the subject so that he, Morse, could try out the snapper’s expensive lens.

It is difficult to imagine his predecessor, Sir John Bourn, being quite so playfully assertive. The photographer was certainly nonplussed, and Morse’s press officer looked a little surprised too.

Unlike Sir John, a career civil servant, Morse has spent most of his life in the private sector. He gave a speech at Civil Service Live this month, and his style was very different from his predecessor’s: peppered with jokes, relatively informal and far less sedate. Presumably, their leadership styles will be equally different.

In recent times, NAO staff have had to get used to a fair bit of change. In October 2007 Sir John announced that he would retire after 20 years in the role; he cited a conflict of interest with another role, but his decision came after his expenses were revealed and criticised. An investigation by the Public Accounts Commission, established in 1983 to oversee the NAO’s work, concluded that there was no impropriety on his part – but an inquiry by former Financial Services Authority chief executive John Tiner did recommend some significant reforms to the NAO’s governance. Acting chief executive Tim Burr has overseen those changes, which include the appointment of an NAO board and a ten-year limit on the chief executive’s tenure.

So, does the arrival of Morse herald further upheaval? Morse, six weeks into the job, says he has no detailed plans yet. “I have an ambition for the National Audit Office to be one of the influences that drives improvement in the way we do things in the public sector,” he says. “I want to see us cover the whole range of issues that we can possibly cover.”

Departments should expect to see a slightly different approach from the auditors as a result. Morse wants the NAO to report more on structural and thematic issues that are at work across the whole of the civil service. “It’s a very valid thing to look at individual cases as we do now, but we need to tie them in to the wider picture,” he says.

At the same time, he wants the NAO to use the access its auditing role gives it across government – including its confidential relationship with departments – to make the advice “work better for the civil service client”. The relationship should not be an adverserial one, but one that is “informative and supportive”, he explains.

Within the NAO itself, Morse says his private sector upbringing will mean a change of tone. “I come from the background of having spent most of my working life in a large, professional, accounting firm in the private sector”, he says, insisting that “my view of the role will be that I’m one of a team” – albeit its most senior member. “That is slightly different from the traditional view”, he adds. He also wants NAO directors, with guidance and support, to take on more responsibility.

Talking about the wider differences between the public and private sectors, Morse identifies the private sector’s flatter organisation model, higher quality of IT systems, and better information. The NAO may find itself working to acquire these qualities too – although Morse rules out job cuts for the time being.

Morse certainly believes the public sector will have to take on some of these traits if it is going to survive the belt-tightening of the next five or ten years. “Probably, in the end, it’s going to mean flatter organisations,” he says. At Civil Service Live, he said that would mean “less headcount” in the next few years, but he qualifies this when we meet by saying that organisations will “have to think about working more efficiently, not just taking resources out”.

This belt-tightening will also demand a different approach to delivery, he argues – such as “using information as a way of getting consistent performance across government, with less layers of management”. Arguing that this has already occurred in the private sector, he explains that it will require good-quality information that comes in the right package.

An example, he says, is specialist medical care for diseases whose incidence is thinly spread across the country. Instead of providing a specialist unit in one location, he suggests, improved IT could be used to connect the patients and specialists remotely. “Think about the way you can connect with special interest groups on the internet nowadays,” he says. “It is possible to stream services like that.”

While these changes are introduced, the NAO is in a “unique position” to “hold up the mirror to the public sector”, he says. “It is very hard to see all that from within the organisation, or even from on top of it. When you’re outside it, looking into it, in a privileged position, you can provide a valuable view.” And the NAO’s view is “not just yet another opinion”, he adds, because the auditor’s conclusions are “based on hard evidence”.

These thoughts are not revolutionary. But Morse believes that the NAO can do more to examine the hard evidence behind “prioritisation decisions”, setting out the costs and benefits of a decision, including connected and unintended costs and benefits. For example, if a change requires a new IT system, the benefits that system could bring to other areas of work need to be calculated as well.

This will happen through the NAO’s reports, which “are going to adapt”, and also informally through the auditing relationship. “If you have a good relationship with [the management], you give advice right up to the top of the organisation,” Morse says. It is this ability which has made accountancy such a significant profession, he adds. The “ability to measure, to produce evidence, to assess things objectively is enormously valuable in making good business decisions and making good administration decisions”.

Morse has seen the rise and rise of the accountancy and consultancy business first hand, having been with PricewaterhouseCoopers and its predecessor for most of his working life – since 1977. He remained there for 29 years, until 2006, when he moved to become the commercial director at the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

He does not believe that three decades with a firm whose work for the government will be examined by the NAO will cause any problems. “It is now over three years since I retired from PwC – and I did retire from them, so I don’t have a conflict of interest. I wish them well, of course, my former firm, but that is where it stops,” he says. “In my time at the MoD I have appointed just as many [non-PwC] as PwC people, purely on merit each time. It would be a pretty sad lookout if you can’t manage to be independent”.

The NAO has already examined, and will continue to examine, work in which Morse was involved as the defence department’s commercial director – and the auditors’ latest report into MoD procurement was quite critical. But Morse denies any conflict of interest, arguing that  if the NAO was asked to comment on something that he had personally been involved in, he would “make quite sure that it was done in an independent way. If I’d seen [this potential conflict] as a big problem, I would not have taken the job.”

Having made the move from the public to the private sector, Morse is keen for others to do the same, and believes there should be more secondments. “They’re happening,” he says, but “there aren’t enough” because of the costs to departments and their fear of losing members of staff permanently. “You just have to work at that as hard as you can, and it needs leadership from the top to say: ‘We really want this to happen, try and get out as much as you can’.”

Secondments, he says, could fill some of the skills gaps in the public sector caused by the traditional dominance of ‘generalists’. In the private sector, “people are much more deeply specialised, and they stay in those specialisms”, he explains. “They will naturally have a very deep knowledge which somebody coming in from the civil service will be able to pick up and learn from quite quickly.”

Meanwhile, he says, the civil service should grow its own specialists. The civil service’s rate of churn has long been identified as a problem: past NAO reports have highlighted the problem of project managers leaving before work is finished and, at Civil Service Live, Morse described how some MoD suppliers “had been around for far longer than their counterpart at the MoD, and had seen the same thing happening again and again”.

A less transient workforce will only appear when civil servants believe their careers will not suffer from extended tenure in one job or field, Morse warns: “People will only believe it when they see specialists being promoted.” That is “quite a big step”, he says – but an appetite for specialists can be seen in the insistence that all department financial directors are qualified. “It will take a long time – if ever – for generalism to stop being a part of the civil service, but I think, progressively, the civil service will identify more areas where it needs people with a deeper specialism,” he predicts.

While the public sector may have something to learn from the private sector, Morse is adamant that “one is not better than the other”, and he is not someone who believes the civil service is flabby and overly ripe for pruning. “All my time in the public sector, I have been working pretty hard,” he insists.

Since joining the NAO, Morse has found “some very good people and [a] very high level of professional skills”. When it comes to specialists’ knowledge and understanding of their field, he believes the NAO is a leader in the public sector: “Think how many accountants we have got sitting in this building. This is a deep well of expertise that should be helping the public sector to move forward. I really see it like that.” And he believes his staff do too: “I find that, as I articulate these ambitions to my colleagues here, they really want to [do this] as well. I want to see us do it as a team.”