Former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara has voiced concerns about the civil service's ability to properly learn lessons from the public inquiries into Covid, the Grenfell Tower disaster and the Post Office's Horizon scandal.
MacNamara, who left government in 2021, said she believed a restructuring of Whitehall was required to enable departments to fix the failings that inquiries expose.
In an interview with the i newspaper, she suggested that instead of looking for ways to embed change for the better, the default option was to pass the buck to other parts of government.
"At the end of the Covid Inquiry [and] the Post Office inquiry, it will be really a healthy thing if the civil service, in some way, looks across these inquiries [in] aggregate and says, ‘What has the civil service learnt from these things?’" she said.
"I would encourage people to do that in a way which also listens to the other people who weren’t part of the statutory inquiry – not at all because there’s a great hidden truth – but because I’ve always found you just get so much more from actually listening to the all the people who were there, not just the bosses."
However MacNamara said current systems did not allow for such approaches – prompting a need for reform.
"How can you structure the way the civil service operates to incentivise people to fix the problem, as opposed to make the problem somebody else’s whether that is their future self, or another department, or another team in a department?" she asked.
MacNamara was director general for housing and planning at the Department for Communities and Local Government at the the the time of 2017's Grenfell fire – which claimed 72 lives.
She said the blaze had been "profoundly shocking" and immediately produced a realisation in her that there had been a "massive, massive failure".
MacNamara said Grenfell had an immense impact on civil servants – although one she stressed wasn't "anything like as horrendous" as it was for the families involved.
The final report of the Grenfell Inquiry last week said DCLG – since rebranded as the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government – had been "complacent" about the building safety regime it was tasked with overseeing and "failed to act" in relation to known risks.
MacNamara'a evidence to the Covid Inquiry included criticisms of a prevailing “alpha, macho and unpleasant” working culture at the heart of government at the outset of the pandemic.
She is one of the government officials known to have been issued with a penalty charge notice by the Metropolitan Police for attending a Whitehall staff get-together that was not permitted under pandemic-time restrictions on social gatherings. At the time her job included oversight of propriety and ethics across government.
Cameron provokes anger with Grenfell comments
Former prime minister Lord David Cameron has been chastised for claiming that the Grenfell Inquiry's final report had absolved his former government's attempts to reduce "red tape" of blame for contributing to the disaster.
On Friday Cameron posted comments on X that acknowledged all those "who served in positions of power" had made mistakes that played a role in the tower block fire and that the British state had let down, victims, survivors and their communities.
But the ex-PM went on to say: "The report is clear that fire safety and building safety regulations were explicitly excluded from the coalition government’s greatly-needed ‘red tape reviews’, given the importance we placed on safety and build quality. Indeed, the coalition and post-2015 governments took steps to increase fire safety regulation."
Although the coalition government excluded the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 from its red-tape-cutting drive, the inquiry found that Building Regulations and other important documents related to fire safety were not exempt.
Blaze survivor and Grenfell activist Ed Daffarn told the Guardian he was "angry" but "not surprised" by Cameron's comments.
"The report is a damning indictment of a government that put UK plc before the health and safety of Grenfell," he said. "The result is that 72 people die because the regulations didn’t keep them safe."
Daffern said that both Cameron and former communities secretary Lord Eric Pickles had failed to take responsibility for the disaster in its aftermath, "despite the overwhelming evidence put before the inquiry and its findings".
Over the weekend, Pickles criticised "middle-ranking officials" for failing to properly act on another pre-Grenfell warning sign: a coroner's statutory letter to government raising safety concerns after 2009's Lakanal House flats fire in Southwark, in which six people died.
Pickles also attempted to float the same argument as Cameron – that Building Regulations had been excluded from the coalition government's deregulation drive.
He had made the same case in evidence to the inquiry in 2022. The inquiry's final report found the claim was "flatly contradicted by that of his officials and by the contemporaneous documents".