Mary Dejevsky: Should we abolish the civil service?

When I pass the Home Office I cannot resist the question: 'What do they do all day?'

The part of London where I live is weighed down with ponderous government buildings. Defra occupies as diffuse a collection of premises, as its name would suggest. I could not tell you where the Department for Education and Skills stops and the DTI begins. I have seen many a plaque come and go including, twice, the Deputy Prime Minister's.

But the new Home Office caps them all. Shiny-white and new, without the telltale dirty net curtains (to stop glass shards in the event of a bomb), it stretches the length of a block. My apologies to the architect, Terry Farrell, but it reminds me of nothing more than the Soviet-era state-planning headquarters, Gosplan, with a few coloured lozenges added for some decadent Western "fun". And when I pass this edifice, as I often do, I cannot resist the obvious question: "What on earth do they do all day?" (and a selfish one, along the lines of: "Why could they not have livened up the ground floor by leasing it to Waitrose?").

Now, thanks to the flood of adverse publicity from the Home Office, I feel a little better informed. But not much. For what has come out of all these procedural inquests is more about what the Home Office does not do than what it does. What it does not do, we have learnt, is identify foreign citizens in our prisons, revisit judges' recommendations for deportation, track individuals who overstay visas, check residency entitlement before issuing National Insurance numbers or log foreign nationals out of the country when they leave. In fact, if you look on the bright side, we may have far fewer foreign offenders still here than the Home Office thinks.

The real question is not what the Home Office, or other government departments for that matter, does or does not do, but what it should be doing, which, I rather suspect, is a different thing. Here David Cameron, when he tried to lay the blame at Tony Blair's door at Prime Minister's Questions yesterday, was on the right track. Mr Blair does indeed bear much of the responsibility, but not, as Mr Cameron suggested, because he has been in power all this time, while Home Secretaries have come and gone. He bears the blame because, in trying to introduce his radical policies of deregulation and choice, he left out the Civil Service. And by left out, I do not mean that he failed to consult them: he exempted the Civil Service from the reforms.

Now, Mr Blair is hardly the first prime minister to have been wary of the Civil Service. Yes, Minister has left its mark on a generation. All prime ministers who come to office with a reformist glint in their eye are right to be wary of this self-styled Rolls-Royce of a government machine, with its apex of first-class Oxbridge minds.

A politically neutral Civil Service is a wondrous phenomenon, admired around the world for its intellectual calibre and the consistency it brings to administration. But it has certain drawbacks, notably the institutional bias in favour of the status quo, which means jobs, honours and pensions, as well as their methods of work.

Margaret Thatcher's solution, multiplied many times over by Mr Blair, was the placing of special advisers in sensitive departments to keep the implementation of policy so far as possible on (her) track. But the scale of changes envisaged by Mr Blair went further, in many respects, than even the then Mrs Thatcher had contemplated. Not only was he determined to continue privatisation - extending it to the railways and some prisons - but to solicit private money for basic public services, such as schools and hospital facilities.

The efficacy of these policies has yet to be judged, and I have my own misgivings. But the logical conclusion begging to be drawn was surely that, with so much of the public sector being farmed out to private initiative, the requirement for whole civil service departments should also be reviewed. Cutting even thousands of jobs, as the Chancellor has proposed, is an invitation for the usual shilly-shallying. Departments with clout keep their jobs; the weak get shipped out of town, and trimming, such as it is, takes place from the bottom. The all too predictable result is inefficiency and complaints of staff shortages - the probation service, for instance - when mistakes are made.

With the huge majority Mr Blair enjoyed in his first two terms, he had an opportunity to ask fundamental questions about how big a Civil Service was needed for the hybrid public sector he had in mind, and what were the functions that should properly remain with the state. There was a chance for root-and-branch reform and the mass transfer of funds used for pen-pushing jobs in London offices to "the front line". The price of not tackling the Civil Service, perhaps the last great vested interest in this country, is the duplication, confusion and glaring omissions we have discovered at the Home Office these past few weeks.

m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk