Frontline delivery experience will be "hardwired" into recruitment and the terms and conditions for how civil servants get promotion, Darren Jones has said.
Giving a speech on rewiring the state so that it "moves fast and fixes things", the chief secretary to the prime minister announced a change to hiring criteria for senior civil servants to "promote the doers, not just the talkers".
Jones said this would mean that the top of the civil serivce will start to have less experience of writing policy papers, and more from frontline delivery, innovation and the private sector.
Asked by Prospect general secretary Mike Clancy how the government will attract and retain this type of specialist talent, Jones said: "I think practically how you do it is you have to say frontline delivery expertise and experience is as important to us as intellectual policy processes at the top of government.
"And where in the past, civil servants have been incentivised to go into the policy jobs as the route to get promotion, we're going to say you also get promotion from delivery frontline experience. And by the way, you might get bigger bonuses, and it will be hardwired into the recruitment and the terms and conditions for how you then get those promotions."
Jones said that this "doesn't mean that we don't need great policy people, it just means that we need more great delivery people, and we need to rebalance the kind of split of that expertise at the top of the civil service".
He added: "I hope that will mean that's a great opportunity for people who currently work for us, but also then to get the people outside the civil service who tend to then focus their time on delivery, not coming up with policy papers, that they might want to come in and be rewarded for it."
Better productivity 'is route to better pay' for junior grades
After he delivered his speech at today's event, Jones was asked by PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote what is being done to fix the low pay that "blights" junior grades in the civil service who are "really are on the frontline and delivering every single day".
Jones said taxing more and spending more can only do part of the work and "the real route to improving pay is by improving productivity" and, in the process, "making it easier for those workers to be able to do their job".
"That frees up a lot of spending and capacity currently done just kind of trying to lurch your way through the system," Jones said.
"So it will enable us to be able to do things like better pay, but at a macro level, therefore reduce what is currently an unsustainable trajectory of public spending on pretty rubbish public services.
"So it's a win for the taxpayer, a win for the customer, and a win for the civil servants."