Gus O'Donnell rightly makes a big deal of professional skills for government.

Parity of esteem, he says, for corporate services, service delivery and policy. Spot on Gus, a good idea.

But good ideas aren't actually that hard to come by (just ask Felix Dennis - www.felixdennis.com), the difficult bit is actually making them work. It's all about implementation.

The tragedy of government (of all colours, of all nations) is the overvaluing of ideas and the undervaluing of delivery. PSG is designed to correct this but, in a rich irony, PSG itself risks just being a good idea, and no more.

If the government is serious about upskilling the civil service (and by jove, it should be) then it needs to apply itself. And that means application in a nuts and bolts sense. Hard graft and reform. Reform not just of structures (any shiny suited 23 year old consultant can reform a structure) but reform of culture. Structures were in place at HMRC but my son's personal details still went missing. They went missing because the culture just isn't right.

It is the culture(s) of the civil service that, above all else, that needs reforming. Do the senior people really understand this? You can invent as many schemes, programmes, policies as you like - but they're only ever going to be as good as the people and the cultures sustaining them.