More must be done to harness the potential and ideas of the frontline staff in the public-facing civil service workforce, a new report warns.
The Public Accounts Committee's report on “smarter delivery” of public services, published yesterday, highlights the “enormous” innovative potential of the 290,000-strong operational delivery profession.
But it says the civil service needs to create “an environment that encourages openness, innovation, and challenge of current thinking, with senior leaders who see failure as an opportunity to learn rather than an exercise in sharing out blame”.
It calls on departmental heads of profession to set out how they will ensure that their staff have the time, skills, tools and support to "raise ideas, learn from each other, and get involved with improving services".
The report also warns that the visibility of the ODP beyond the civil service is low and says this is “a barrier to people seeing it as the right career path for them”.
The ODP’s members in public-facing roles work in prisons, issue passports, process benefits claims, work in jobcentres, administer the tax system, process people at the UK Border, and more.
Raising the profession's external profile would “encourage the brightest and best to join it, particularly students”, the report says.
The MPs are also calling for upskilling of civil servants so that they can effectively use artificial intelligence.
The report notes that the capabilities that civil servants need are changing, and says government employees need support to navigate the impact of new technology and AI. But it says the evidence provided to the committee 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”.
A report earlier this year from the Ada Lovelace Institute found hesitancy among frontline public sector professionals to use AI.
The report also calls on the profession to "look at how effectively it is building the capabilities that are needed to deliver improvements to the cost and quality of government services".
As part of its inquiry, the MPs also looked at the Surge and Rapid Response Team, which is part of the ODP. The SRRT is meant to be deployed as a last resort to help government departments deal with significant increases in demand, which can result from crises (e.g. the collapse of an airline) or seasonal peaks (e.g. winter fuel payments). In 2024, the team supported 75 deployments across government.
The committee explored whether departments were 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.
PAC said the ODP had “acknowledged to the inquiry that departments should be better at dealing with their own peaks and troughs”. The report recommends that the profession should “conduct an analysis of who is using the SRRT and why they are using it”.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, chair of PAC, 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."
Clifton-Brown added: "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.”
A government spokesperson said: “We’re taking decisive action to upskill the civil service in AI and digital technology, including training 100,000 officials by 2030 and deploying practical AI tools that are enabling civil servants to spend less time on paperwork and more time delivering for the public.
“We agree with the committee on the importance of harnessing frontline expertise. We're reviewing its recommendations in detail and will respond formally in due course."
The government also said it has identified key capability priorities and is working to address backlogs through a combination of process improvements, automation, and upskilling the workforce.
It added that it has restricted the rapid response team to genuine demand surges and crises to ensure departments invest in departmental operational capability to handle predictable demand effectively.