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Reforming the civil service won’t “in itself make a dramatic difference to government effectiveness,” former cabinet secretary Lord O’Donnell told the Public Administration Select Committee today. Instead, government needs to ensure it is clear about what it wants to achieve, he added.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) should set out an explicit industrial strategy for defence procurement, the Commons’ Defence Committee said in a report published yesterday. Such a strategy would ensure that procurement decisions take account of their likely impact on British businesses, rather than simply pursuing value for money.

Commissioners from across the public sector can now apply to join a virtual Commissioning Academy, launched last week.

The chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, Sir Christopher Kelly, has warned in an article written for Civil Service World that new ways of providing services – including academies, clinical commissioning groups, and increasing delivery by the private and voluntary sectors – will place extra pressures on ethics in public service delivery.

The lack of a senior responsible owner for the West Coast Rail franchise project was the “biggest problem” behind the failure of the bidding process, Sam Laidlaw told the House of Commons Transport Committee yesterday.

A set of new ‘masterclasses’ that aim to help the voluntary and community sector (VCS) to secure public sector contracts were announced by the Cabinet Office  last week.

HMRC’s customer services operations have improved from their low point of 2010 but still represent poor value for money to the taxpayer, a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) concluded yesterday.

A new Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is to become fully operational in April 2014, under plans to merge the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission.

The government is looking to establish joint ventures so that some of its intellectual property businesses can enter international markets, Stephen Kelly, government’s new chief operating officer, has told CSW.

The Ministry of Defence’s procurement arm – Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) – can only continue to offer current levels of service for the department if some jobs are outsourced, its boss Bernard Gray, chief of defence materiel, told the Commons’ Defence Committee yesterday.

Never mind the NAO; ministers too hate a risk gone wrong