We can't have Sir Jeremys running the Civil Service Then there was the project to "modernise" the NHS computer systems, replacing them all with a single system that would enable any doctor to access any patient's records. After a decade, and nearly £12 billion spent, the project was abandoned, without a new system, but with the NHS facing a £750 million lawsuit from one of the contractors. What can reduce the risk of blunders? The Government has tried hiring consultants, but that only puts money into their pockets. It gives civil servants a new way to deflect blame. It doesn't improve their decisions. Holding civil servants to account might help, but it wouldn't solve the problem of getting the contracts for the provision of services by private companies right. The difficulty is that, in drawing up contracts, civil servants are being asked to do something they are generally not equipped, either by training or temperament, to do. They are being asked to be businessmen. But they have no experience of business, and their training focuses on intellectual ways to solve problems. A brief stint in the private sector - Sir Jeremy had four years as a director of Morgan Stanley - isn't enough to change a civil servant into a successful businessman. The whole notion of the "generalist civil servant" relies on the idea that there is a rational procedure that can be employed to solve any problem. Learn to apply the procedure correctly, and it does not matter whether the issue is train franchises or the procurement of surgical gloves: you will be able to identify the best choice. That model is wrong. There are many activities - and drafting complicated contracts is one of them - where there is no substitute for experience in the relevant market. Civil servants do not have the experience. The people who are on the other side of the contract do - which is why they repeatedly run rings around the bureaucrats. The costs and the risks end up with the taxpayers. The profits end up with the private contractors. Lord (Gus) O" Donnell, the former head of the Civil Service, has a simple solution: pay businessmen the market rate to draw up the contracts. But if he is, it would surely be the end of the Civil Service as traditionally conceived. What is the point of the old-style generalist bureaucrat when all the business of government has been contracted out - including the business of writing the contracts themselves? The problems with the Civil Service cannot be rectified by replacing Sir Jeremy with someone else with the same Whitehall background. Only someone outside the system will be able to change it in the way required.