The emergency budget presented by George Osborne last week has been cautiously lauded by many commentators. Once derided as too inexperienced, Osborne has an increasing air of authority and a new reputation for toughness. Can he deliver? By his own reckoning, "unprotected" departments outside of health and international development will need to cut their costs by 25%. Independent analysts point out that if the government also wants to limit reductions in the budget for schools and defence, unprotected departments will need to reduce expenditure by as much as a third.
This kind of surgery would be akin to a lobotomy. The Home Office, for example, would have to find about £3.1bn in savings against its plans for 2009/10 – more than twice its spending on immigration and border control every year. For this to be remotely plausible – and it probably isn't, so expect further tax rises and/or welfare cuts in the autumn – departments will have to do much more than trim round the edges. Wholesale reform to the way this country provides public services would be required.
But as Tony Blair pointed out in a speech on Monday, wholesale reform is precisely what the civil service is ill-equipped to lead. The civil service can be "a plot to maintain the status quo" he advised the coalition, perhaps recalling Laurence J Peter's quip that bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time the quo has lost its status. Many would argue that this inertia is a blessing, that we should be thankful for the Sir Humphreys who repeatedly rescue the country from ministers' (or, latterly, spin doctors') lunatic schemes.
Plans as challenging and fast-paced as Osborne's look certain to be frustrated by the bureaucracies in charge of implementing them, and not only because the civil service is temperamentally opposed to radical change. It is also held back by an ossified culture. One remarkable feature of the civil service (long ago identified by Max Weber about bureaucracies in general) is its strict hierarchy and regimented decision-making. For many mandarins attending steering groups, drafting ministerial submissions and cross-government strategies are the mainstay of their working day. Driving real change is not. This reinforces a culture that's fearful of risk and insular. So too do incentives that reward proximity to ministers and control over large budgets above all else.
The civil service is also encumbered by limited capabilities. This has nothing to do with talent: Whitehall continues to attract excellent people, though its track record of developing them is less impressive. Yet its anachronistic attachment to a generalist workforce means the civil service increasingly finds itself short of the skills required to drive through change of the magnitude implied by Osborne's budget.
Much more open recruitment – at all levels – is part of the answer. But so is bringing in external expertise from other sectors when it is genuinely warranted. This may be just the time to move to a much smaller permanent civil service supported by external experts that can contribute specialist skills – at a reasonable cost – on a case-by-case basis.
The Labour government learned some strategies for getting things done that the coalition would do well to follow – such as ruthless prioritisation, paying attention to incentives and the importance of planning and systematically driving implementation.
But as Blair intimated in his speech, these came too late and, moreover, little was done to reform the civil service itself – the government's agent for change. To deliver anything like the ambition set out by the chancellor last week, he may find he needs a whole new way of doing government.