There has been speculation that the government is keen to bring forward a civil service bill. Do you agree that one is needed?

Jonathan Baume:It's a governance issue. Special advisers have received a lot of attention but actually that's a just a small element of it. There is a need to consolidate the basic principles and values of the civil service which were set out in the Northcote-Trevelyan Report in 1854. At the very end of the report, it says everything should be enshrined in legislation, but it never has been.

It's not that there is an immediate threat that somehow the basic principles of political impartiality and appointments on merit are going to be stripped away, but as the public sector and the civil service changes, then it's important that those values are consolidated.

All the main political parties agree that these are the values which should be anchored during the process of change. The majority of SCS entrants are from other parts of the public sector - from sectors which work in different ways. In local government, for example, there is a difference in relationship between politicians and senior officers. And people coming in from the private sector know very little about the traditional values of the civil service, such as political impartiality, and appointment and promotion on merit.

If you are opening up the civil service and people are taking on relatively senior positions without ever having gone through the civil service training and development, it's important that they understand the positive cultures and values of the civil service.

I think the other part of governance is consolidating the role of the Civil Service Commission which could easily be stripped away. The Commission has a key role in protecting values as well as overseeing particular recruitment processes. At the moment, it simply reports to the Prime Minister of the day, but we believe the Commission should be answerable to Parliament, because it's about having cross party consensus. If you start involving ministers more in senior appointments, it can cause problems in terms of the loss of stability after elections.

Actually, a civil service bill need not be very long or complex. I think that if it is, there's less chance of getting through Parliament. We want to see something that consolidates civil service values and the role of the Commission as the foundations of any bill. We'd also like to see it define what is the civil service, which no one can successfully do at the moment.

What would be your response if it didn't make it into the Queens Speech?

Jonathan Baume:I know that the Tories and Liberal Democrats, like ourselves, have called for it to be in the Queen's Speech, and if it isn't, I'll be very disappointed. If it isn't, the Public Administration Select Committee is going to produce its own bill which they will try and pursue through the House. Inevitably, that would be a much harder process.

Getting a bill through in the normal way ought not to be a difficult process, as long as it has cross-party support. Nobody is calling for getting rid of special advisers after all. The issue is whether the bill clarifies some of their roles which it probably will need to do. I think there is some controversy as to whether there should be some limit on numbers. Either you cap the finance for special advisers or you cap the physical numbers. We're generally sympathetic to the idea of capping numbers because at the moment there is nothing to stop a prime minister appointing 4,000 special advisers, rather than the 80 we've got at the moment. But we're open to dialogue as to how that could be done.

The proposal to cap the numbers came from the Committee on Standards in Public Life and we endorsed that. We're not wedded to a particular approach - we just think there ought to be much greater clarity as to the extent which ministers can directly appoint people to fulfil certain roles.

Do you think there has been a creeping politicisation of the civil service in recent years?

Jonathan Baume:No, I don't think there has. The same accusations were directed towards Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s and I think it was wrong then and it is wrong now. What any government wants is people with a "can-do" mentality - or in other words, people who focus on delivery.

I joined the civil service in 1977 and it has changed enormously since then. I think incoming governments want the civil service to be effective. At times there has been a lot of confusion in the minds of government about what delivery means because civil servants actually deliver relatively small amounts of public services. FDA members don't directly deliver in health, education or local government services.

What civil servants do need to do though, is work through policy initiatives in a way which will ensure these deliver on the ground. So you need to understand the practical implications of policy, and I think it's fair to say that at times in the past, that hasn't always been well thought through.

There are also areas where the civil service is interacting with the private sector - needing skills which I think everyone agrees are in short supply. I think one of the reasons we've been having trouble about the whole issue of private involvement in the public sector is that there simply isn't experience in the public sector of drawing up very complex contracts that actually go as far ahead as the government wants. And, of course, the private sector is very happy to take advantage of that.

Maybe the government is in some ways trying to do the impossible - one can question whether actually trying to draw up a contract which will cover every aspect of every issue for the next 30 years is possible.

What do you think of the unions' call for a moratorium on PFI projects?

Jonathan Baume:We actually abstained on the TUC vote in Blackpool on that motion. We've never had a policy of either support or opposition - that's a matter for the elected government. If a government wants to deliver services in that way, that's their prerogative. We would approach individual cases on their merit - particularly when they directly involve changes to our members. There is an increasing body of evidence that questions the design of contracts.

Various organisations have suggested that people are increasingly tempted to work backwards. If you know that you have to prove that the PFI approach is going to be better value than the public sector approach, you construct figures and arguments which justify PFI. This is in the full knowledge that if your figures show that the public sector would provide better value for money, it's going to be turned down. People are being asked to reach a conclusion which might not in the end be justified and I think that is what the Audit Commission and National Audit Office are starting to highlight.

So while we're not supporting a call for abandoning all PFIs, I think there are some very real issues that the government is unwilling to publicly answer and debate. There is little real transparency.

Sir Andrew Turnbull is keen to implement a series of reforms - what is your response?

Jonathan Baume:I'm perfectly happy with Andrew's appointment. I've known him over many years and he is highly capable and very thoughtful, with an extremely good track record. What we haven't yet seen is what the changes will be. He gave a statement to a Commons committee in June, but really nothing else has emerged. I think the Cabinet Office is still reorganising itself since he arrived at the beginning of September. Plus, the key job, the director responsible for civil service reform, has only just been announced and won't start until November.

So, in essence, we're saying that we'll assess things when we see the detail. There are some quite big changes signalled from the document in June. They are about empowering departments to get on and do, and departments being "audited" and then Andrew and the Cabinet Office stepping in if the departments are not delivering.

Certainly the changes to the Cabinet Office are well overdue - we were arguing for exactly the same changes to be made. The way that units were bolted on after the general election last year left a lot of people, including many people in the centre, very unclear about who was supposed to be responsible for what and that just made it harder for departments.

What is your response to people from the private sector coming into jobs at the top of the civil service?

Jonathan Baume:I think the Civil Service Commission showed that the vast majority of external appointees actually come from the public sector, and in practice that is what you'd expect. Already the interchange between the Department of Health in England and the devolved institutions is growing day by day, and that makes a great deal of sense. More interaction between local and central governments is also happening, and that is all very sensible.

Part of the reason for not having large numbers joining from the private sector comes down to salary - the more senior you go the bigger the disparity in salary. I think we need to be careful about the assumption that somehow bringing in private sector people is some kind of answer. I think governments have been very glib about this, without really understanding the situation - partly because very few ministers have experience of the private sector.

The private sector works very differently. Senior jobs in the private sector are, by and large, command and control jobs. Senior jobs in the civil service are about influencing your colleagues and people in other departments and about interacting with ministers, politicians and other outside interests. It's a much more subtle job than many private sector jobs, which is why people from the private sector often struggle.

I've got no problem with secondments for a couple of years, but I think that bringing people in and somehow assuming they can do these jobs is wrong. The political interface is one of the hardest parts to the job - it's something you learn as a fast streamer. Spending time in a private office, you start to understand how Parliament works and everything that goes with it. Bringing someone in from the private sector to a top civil service job and expecting them to grasp all this, when many of them have probably never been in a Whitehall department and have very little understanding of Parliament, and are not used to dealing with the egos of politicians, is unrealistic. Many find it incredibly difficult, which is why many private sector people who have come into ministerial jobs often struggle to make a mark because they're simply not used to that sort of environment.

So do you think the private sector understands the ethos of the civil service? Should a rigorous training programme be in place?

Jonathan Baume:Anybody coming into the SCS gets training, and quite rightly so. The positive aspects of civil service cultures are ones that you grow into and learn, but there is a real issue about ethics and standards in the private sector. We've been very supportive of the call by the Public Administration Committee for a public service code. At the TUC in Blackpool, I moved a motion calling for support for that code, and there was widespread support for it.

The fact is the private sector has shown that its ethical standards are very lax. It doesn't mean that no one in the private sector has any values or any sense of ethics, but actually, if your bottom line is making a profit, it is very easy to get on to a slippery slope where that starts to cloud your judgement. There have been far too many major companies that have demonstrated that they've lost sight of any ethical basis.

The ethical standards in the public sector are remarkably high in Britain - of course, there is always the occasional problem, but there is remarkably little corruption. The UK has one of the lowest levels of corruption anywhere in Europe. Members of the British civil service actually go out to developing nations and all over eastern Europe, explaining how we run an ethical civil service. The government has accepted now that a public service ethos does exist. Anyone who denies this is utterly cynical. There are very few FDA members who couldn't go into the private sector and get higher salaries. Our Inland Revenue members, for example, could double their salaries. They don't because there is an ethos there - they believe in public service. The danger is that if you bring people in who simply don't understand this, the values start to be corroded.

What a civil servant knows is that regardless of their own personal take on an issue, their job is to implement the policy of the government. There is also misunderstanding from the opposition that the civil service is a neutral umpire between government and opposition. The civil service works for the elected government of the day, and the job is to deliver and present these policies. Any successive governments will have exactly that level of service and dedication. This means you don't have to start stripping out layers of people when a new government comes in - it's a very stable system.

I remember talking to someone in the American embassy after George W Bush was elected. One of the problems they had was that after almost a year, they still hadn't filled one of the key Middle East desks in the State Department. This was a critical area but it was still going through Congressional processes. In Britain this would never happen.

Has the pensions crisis affected FDA members?

Jonathan Baume:We have just introduced an enhanced pension scheme. The previous scheme had become less efficient over time. We would resist any scrapping of final pension schemes - its scandalous what some businesses have done.

Is the FDA connected to the NHS?

Jonathan Baume:Over ten per cent of our members work in the NHS as senior managers. If the reforms of the health service go through, they are only going to work if senior managers are motivated and treated fairly. Far too often people are being scapegoated. It's happening less than it used to, but it is still happening. Trust by Trust, we are still having to introduce grievance procedures which is a very wasteful process. We did a survey of senior members of the NHS and their perception is that chief executives have a lifespan of 18 months. This is not true in England, but the fact that people perceive this is happening is deeply worrying. These are enormous jobs and if people think they have such a short lifespan, it's going to be increasingly hard to attract individuals to take on these jobs.

The NHS Confederation does an excellent job but it represents the Trusts. There is only the FDA representing senior managers and employees themselves, so there is a big agenda of protecting and developing very senior mangers which we are starting to articulate. We are working with Nigel Crisp and the other heads of the NHS to get them to recognise that these are very important issues. You cannot implement the change the government wants if you don't have motivated chief executives. The FDA is going to be pushing much harder to make sure these issues stay on the agenda.