WIREDGOV

The capabilities that civil servants need are changing, and government employees must be supported to navigate the impact of new technology and artificial intelligence (AI).

• Read the report
• Read the report (PDF)
• Smarter delivery of public services
• Public Accounts Committee

In a report on the smarter delivery of public services, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) calls for more to be done to harness the potential and ideas of the frontline staff in the public-facing civil service workforce.

The PAC’s inquiry focused on the Operational Delivery Profession (ODP). This represents over half of the wider civil service (290,000 people). It is the largest civil service profession, and is made up of those who work directly with the public in every kind of role, or those who support this work.

The inquiry found that the visibility of the ODP beyond the civil service is low, which is a barrier to people seeing it as the right career path for them. The PAC is calling on the ODP to raise its external profile to encourage the brightest and best to join it, particularly students.

Given the size of the ODP, its innovative potential is enormous, and the report also recommends senior leaders develop plans to ensure staff are able to raise ideas, learn from each other, and get involved with improving services.

The report finds that the expertise that public-facing civil servants will need in the future will require skills associated with digital professions; for example, the capability to provide services online or via apps, and through using AI.

Automating straightforward types of demand means that staff can spend their time dealing with customers with more complex needs, or who cannot access digital services.

But evidence to the inquiry suggests that public sector adoption of AI is still uneven and at an early stage, with a skills shortfall cited as one of the barriers to progress.

The PAC calls on government to define the digital skills that the ODP requires, to support its adoption by government organisations for the delivery of better services.

The ODP is also responsible for the Surge and Rapid Response Team (SRRT). The SRRT is meant to be deployed as a last resort to help government departments deal with significant increases in demand, including from crises (e.g. the collapse of an airline) or seasonal peaks (e.g. winter fuel payments). In 2024, this highly-trained team supported 75 deployments across government.

The PAC explored whether departments were in fact using the SRRT as a "get-out" clause, building it into their capability plans, rather than becoming more agile at dealing with their own demand. The ODP acknowledged to the inquiry that departments should be better at dealing with their own peaks and troughs, and the PAC recommends it conduct an analysis of who is using the SRRT and why they are using it.

The PAC identifies in its report a number of examples of how weaknesses in government’s operational delivery will routinely have real consequences for citizens:

• Lack of capacity to understand and deal with demand ⇒ service backlogs
• Lack of focus on systematic and continuous improvement ⇒ customers’ pain points are not identified and addressed
• Failure to consider systems holistically and siloed working ⇒ demand and cost of dealing with it is simply moved to another part of government.

The report recommends the ODP look at how effectively it is building the capabilities that are needed to deliver improvements to the cost and quality of government services.

Chair comment

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: “The ODP is equivalent to over half of the entire civil service workforce. These are the hardworking professionals who run our borders, our jobcentres, our prisons - and yet the ODP must be Whitehall’s best kept secret.

"It has been fashionable under successive governments to bash the civil service; but our Committee’s function is to scrutinise operational delivery of policy in the civil service, and we want it to succeed. In the ODP, government has a large pool of committed public servants to hand, whose ideas should be harnessed and potential maximised. 

“The civil service should be shouting about the ODP, with a view to providing career paths for young people and joining up with local government and private sector. If this is going to happen, staff will need the right skills to make use of future technologies, including cyber capabilities.

"Government cannot expect civil servants to become magically more productive simply because it purchases AI platforms to run on their computers. To ensure that AI is used safely and effectively to transform services for the citizen, those at the sharp end of deploying it must be actively upskilled in its use. The ODP could be one of the better vehicles to achieve this, if the government follows the recommendations in our report.”

Further information

• About Parliament: Select committees
• Visiting Parliament: Watch committees