The Universal Credit debacle is the fault of the Civil Service, not Iain Duncan Smith Labour MPs were in best scoffing mode yesterday as Iain Duncan Smith was hauled into the Commons to explain the latest awkward report on his beloved Universal Credit reform. "A bad workman blames his tools!" they chortled, as the Work and Pensions Secretary suggested that he had lost faith in the ability of his civil servants to deliver the behemoth project. They growled and chuntered as the minister said, bitterly: "When I arrived, I expected [to find] the professionalism to be able to do this properly." Of course, Labour knows what being a workman with unwieldy tools is like: it presided over the car crash introduction of the tax credit system. And anyone who has read Conundrum by the Telegraph's Christopher Hope and Richard Bacon, the Tory MP, knows that Whitehall often resembles a disaster movie of projects mushrooming out of control. The ministerial workmen may come and go, but their civil service tools stay the same from government to government. The National Audit Office (NAO) report on Universal Credit made for difficult reading but the focus was more on the day-to-day operations of the department than on the decision-making at the top. It described a "fortress" mentality within the team and a "good news" culture, where officials avoided telling ministers about problems. It said the department used unfamiliar methods to implement the reform, and that there was a "lack of a detailed plan." Ministers are rarely mentioned, save for an acknowledgement that Mr Duncan Smith's colleagues were paying more than usually close attention to this project. Indeed, sources close to the Work and Pensions Secretary argue that it was only because it was "his baby" that he began to notice the chasm between what officials were telling him and what was really happening. I'm told that "it took until February before Iain completely lost patience with his team," and brought in outsiders to clean up the project. Whitehall insiders point to Robert Devereux, the department's permanent secretary, as the bad tool. A Cabinet friend of Mr Duncan Smith says: "You have a permanent secretary who seemed not to know what he was doing and was not willing to admit it, appallingly badly negotiated contracts with suppliers, which you would not expect, and if ministers want to crawl all over that, then there would be a lot of criticism that they should leave it to the civil servants." Mr Devereux's days have been numbered for a while now. "If he had an ounce of shame," says an observer, "he should have departed some time ago." But what would finish him is if someone senior were to publicly declare that they no longer have confidence in him. Mr Duncan Smith's team is keeping quiet - for now. That this story is as much about the failure of the Civil Service as it is about the policy itself was underlined by the decision of Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude to attend yesterday's urgent question in the Commons on the NAO report. He sat alongside Mr Duncan Smith as the minister fielded attacks from the Labour benches. Mr Maude and Mr Duncan Smith are hardly natural bedfellows, respectively occupying the modernising and the socially conservative wings of the Conservative Party. But I'm told that since coming in to government they have bonded over one thing: the inadequacy of the Civil Service. If the Coalition had regarded overhauling Whitehall as an urgent task from the start, Universal Credit could have received the smooth passage that it deserves. I recently spoke to another minister who, battle-scarred from trying to push major projects through the system, moaned that shaking up the Civil Service should have been as big a priority as education was in the early days of this administration. "It would have made our reforms more effective, and avoided disasters like the West Coast Main Line fiasco," this minister argued. No 10 strategist Steve Hilton wanted early change, but there was insufficient desire in Downing Street. Hot on the heels of the NAO verdict comes a report from the Public Administration Select Committee arguing for a cross-party commission to publish a programme for reforming the Civil Service before the end of this parliament, so that whoever is in power after 2015 can get to work quickly. The three main parties shouldn't find it difficult to agree on this: after all, they all have either current or very recent experience of dealing with a flawed Civil Service. Universal Credit has hardly had the best start, but the project's woes highlight the desperate need for early reform. This might involve a commission or something else, but anyone who wants a radical and effective government after the general election should be drawing up a serious plan to sort out the Whitehall mess.