The Conservative Party has fleshed out its plans for the civil service with a raft of measures designed to increase accountability and professionalism.

Shadow minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude has unveiled proposals which include making profession heads full-time, rather than part-time roles, and discouraging scrutiny bodies and auditors from stifling innovation.

Maude has expressed concern about "depleted morale", quoting staff survey results and sickness figures as proof that the service is crying out for reform.

"The current system fails to incentivise excellence, to support poor performers, is opaque and inflexible, and allows inefficiency to continue without exposing it to proper scrutiny and remedy," he said.

Tory reforms, he added, will "make the civil service a world class institution, a better place to work and ready to deliver the change that this country needs".

One unexpected reform is the proposal to create new full-time posts for the heads of the HR, IT, procurement and finance professions. Currently, all civil service-wide profession head roles are taken on by senior civil servants who already have a department-based full-time position.

Working on the principle that the civil service has been discouraged from innovating because of the public exposure that accompanies any failures, Maude wants the Commons public accounts committee and the National Audit Office to change the focus of their scrutiny work.

In a recent interview with Civil Service World, Maude complained that the civil service was risk-averse because the media, Westminster and the public treated "every failure as a culpable failure. For every failure, there has got to be a senior scapegoat found." He added that politicians had a responsibility to change their approach if innovation was to flourish.

The Tories have already outlined many of their proposals for increasing transparency and accountability, including the publication of salaries and spending online, the manning of department boards with ministers and private sector non-executives, and the publication of departmental business plans and key priorities.

Maude added yesterday that he expected select committees to scrutinise departments in even greater detail than they currently do, by "thoroughly" examining business plans, accounts and reported cost-benefits of policies.

Separate concerns over failures in project management have led the party to call for Senior Responsible Owners (SROs) to stay in place for the entirety of a project's lifetime. Select committee reports have regularly commented on the way the civil service tradition of moving posts every four or so years has contributed to the failure of important government programmes.

With regard to individual civil servants' performance, Maude said the appraisal system should be improved so that the best- and worst-performers are identified, and so that managers can remove staff members who are not performing.

Under the Tories, civil servants can also expect to be personally responsible for finding operational efficiencies, and will be rewarded when they do.

The party also wants the civil service's compensation scheme to be brought into line with the private sector.