Blame game risks a crisis of governance The rail franchising fiasco is just the latest disaster to afflict the civil service. Ministers will no doubt use it to vindicate the Civil Service Reform Plan announced in the summer. It is intended to make civil servants more publicly accountable and has at least the merit of being a plan, which sets out to embrace the skills and practices of the digital age, without compromising traditions of integrity and impartiality. However, it includes significant changes in the training, operation and organisation of the civil service, with little of the independent deliberation expected in past times. Instead, these reforms follow a series of rows, blunders and public disagreements with officials, involving ministers of all parties. This cannot be the right way to go about fundamental change in one of the great institutions of state - on which the stability of our largely uncodified constitution is founded and the continuity of government has depended for a century or more. Many feel there is a crisis of confidence in, and within, the civil service. With each disaster, finger-pointing and blame become more destructive. Ministers now bad-mouth their officials in public. Even the prime minister, who is minister for the civil service, has called officials the "enemies of enterprise." For all the praise Francis Maude heaps on public officials, they will feel angry and demotivated by his speech on Tuesday. No serious organisation can function like this. The rail franchising fiasco, like the Department for Education's inability to give Michael Gove accurate data on the school-building programme, or the long-running problems at the Child Support Agency and the Rural Payments Agency, suggests a crisis of competence across departments. But does this exonerate ministers? Gus O'Donnell, the former cabinet secretary, has rightly pointed out that an inquiry must establish how far the failure is one of policy and how far one of implementation. Yet many ministers appear to have made up their minds - the civil service is to blame for successive governments" poor performance and the reform plan is the result. The government is even starting to contract out policy advice, the raison d"être of the senior civil service. It has abolished the National School for Government and is contemplating top political appointments in place of traditionally impartial officials. Yet successive governments have ended up with the civil service for which they are responsible. Many recent failures of government stem from a tendency to think less about the long term than about the daily news agenda. It has been sad to see eminent and able figures who have devoted their lives to public service caught up "in the thick of it." Now the recriminations threaten to turn a series of expensive and embarrassing mishaps into a crisis of governance. We should be suspicious of the facile idea that a few more special advisers would help transform an organisation of 400,000 people. The problems are far more fundamental, one of them being the decline in specialist expertise at the top of departments. A trend to move top people around departments, intended to aid cross-departmental working, has led to permanent secretaries who are too often jacks of all trades and masters of none. Only three of 16 departments has the same permanent secretary as at the election. At the Department for Transport, they are on their third permanent secretary. Little wonder things go awry. The Public Administration Select Committee has repeatedly warned against splitting the roles of cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, of the lack of vital IT and procurement skills, and of failures in cross-departmental working. Next month PASC will begin an inquiry into the government's reform plans, asking: What should the civil service be for? What skills does it require? How should it be trained and led? How should it be made accountable? And what must be done? I hope we will stake out the ground for debate. I propose that parliament should then establish a carefully chosen commission on the future of the civil service to lay out a comprehensive programme of reform, with cross-party support and the endorsement of parliament as whole. Its recommendations would be a foundation for future stability. At present, reform, however right and necessary, appears to be a hasty response to political pressures and frustration. We can't go on like this. The writer, a Conservative MP, is chair of the public administration select committee