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The civil service suffers from a shortage of delivery skills and a culture that venerates policymaking over organisational improvement, outgoing Home Office director-general Rob Whiteman has said in an interview with CSW.

Rob Whiteman joined the civil service two years ago, as the UKBA chief; now he’s leaving. He tells Matt Ross about the need for delivery skills, the Brodie Clark affair, and life as a ‘transplant’ into the Whitehall machine

Number 10’s briefing against Sir Bob Kerslake was motivated by a desire to speed up civil service reform – but in the short term, at least, publicly undermining the civil service chief is likely to achieve just the opposite.

PASC chair Bernard Jenkin is highly critical of aspects of the civil service – but he’s sympathetic to civil servants themselves, and earlier this month an audience of officials gave his arguments a warm reception. Matt Ross reports.

Improve IT, HR and training – and policy delivery will benefit

The Caxton Grill, housed in the newly refurbished four-star St Ermin’s Hotel by St James’s Park, has long offered refreshments to civil servants of the subterranean variety. MI6 and MI5 operatives met contacts here in the 1930s, and during World War II Winston Churchill ordered that the Special Operations Executive (now the SAS) be formed here. Ian Fleming used to work in St Ermin’s – as did traitors Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, the latter meeting his Soviet contact in the hotel bar.

The civil service has increased its productivity and begun to reform, cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood told an audience at Civil Service Live yesterday, but it will have to redouble its efforts to help the country deal with its huge economic and fiscal challenges.

Weak civil service pay risks brain drain, warn top officials

The MoD is consistently out-negotiated by its private sector suppliers, chief of defence materiel Bernard Gray tells Matt Ross: he wants to bring in some serious firepower from private business to work on our defence procurement

Intelligence agencies’ tools must be updated, not expanded

Battered departmental administration budgets received a further pounding in today’s 2015-16 spending round, with the Home Office (HO), Cabinet Office (CO) and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) seeing punishing settlements that will accelerate civil service cuts as we approach the end of the Parliament.

The efforts of Companies House (CH) to tackle fraud should be based on “strengthening the current model rather than radically changing company law”, its chief executive has told CSW, to ensure that anti-fraud work doesn’t weaken transparency in business information or create additional burdens on business.

Companies House chief Tim Moss runs a happy team in laid-back Cardiff, but there’s plenty of tensions in his job – like those between deregulation and tackling fraud, or open data and revenue generation. Matt Ross meets him

One man’s honest discussion is another’s backstreet mugging

The government is likely to implement a further set of civil service reforms soon, the head of the civil service Sir Bob Kerslake has told CSW, as it pursues “unfinished business” that didn’t make it into last year’s Civil Service Reform Plan (CSRP).

Just follow the patented Department of Health HR manual

A university welfare officer warns that privatisation is weakening the support for students, whilst fees narrow the student group

To envisage my best handwriting, imagine an enthusiastic but pigeon-toed spider that has, after falling into the proverbial inkwell, attempted to combine a Cossack dance, ballet and the 100m sprint.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change is set to become the second Whitehall body to buy in policy development work from outside government, its permanent secretary Stephen Lovegrove has revealed in an interview with CSW.

New DECC chief Stephen Lovegrove has, to his evident relief, missed all the big battles over the direction of our energy policies – but he does face huge challenges in putting those policies into practice. Matt Ross meets him

Let’s hope ministers don’t put it to their blind eye

Chris Wormald, the education department’s permanent secretary, is leading organisational changes that go well beyond the Civil Service Reform Plan. Matt Ross quizzes him on the outcomes of his "zero-based review".

Community budgets may be overtaken by their big brothers

It’s not clear that the MoJ is ready for its next big challenge

The Ministry of Justice is at the forefront of the coalition’s moves towards both outsourcing of service provision, and payment by results – meaning that life isn’t always easy for its chief, Ursula Brennan. Matt Ross meets her

Civil Service Learning is struggling to reverse a terrible trend.

While America’s Californian rappers battle their East Coast rivals, transport chief Philip Rutnam has his own West Coast struggle: the effort to restore his department’s reputation after its rail franchise failure. Matt Ross meets him

The collapse of the West Coast Mainline franchising process won’t deter the Department for Transport (DfT) from taking necessary risks, the department’s permanent secretary has promised in an interview with CSW.

Ministers & officials must also put those lessons into practice.

Former cabinet secretary Lord O’Donnell is to present two programmes on Radio 4 in a bid to defend the work of the civil service.

As governments worldwide wrestle with shrinking budgets, increased volatility and a tide of open data, Matt Ross learns how public service leaders from different countries are meeting the challenges of an ever-changing world

The level of public trust in civil servants has risen dramatically over the last 30 years, a poll by the Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute has found, while politicians are firmly ensconsed at the foot of the table.

Depts must embrace the publication of perm secs’ objectives.

Even without ‘impact assessments’, impacts need assessing.

The government's outgoing equalities chief has expressed his disappointment at the Cabinet Office’s work to improve diversity in public appointments, and called for the publication of a new diversity strategy to reinvigorate efforts to increase the number of women, disabled people and ethnic minorities in top civil service jobs.