John Reid's splitting of the Home Office will change very little the efficiency, effectiveness and low result orientation of this government department and where the government are also using this simply as a smokescreen to their inadequacies.

Having personal and intimate knowledge of the Home Office workings for more than three years, there is a time-served time-warp that overshadows this department that dictates no change will happen - the steady-state syndrome that says if you do nothing, you will still be rewarded the same if you do something that entails risk.

Indeed, do nothing different to the norm and you will receive a secured high salary, excellent perks and a super inflation-proof pension for your services.

A strategy that in the private sector would very quickly fail if you did nothing that changed things for the better, and why the Home Office and other HM government departments are in the dire mess that they are today.

No one changes or challenges the status quo, as risk' in any form that you care to mention, is a word that does not exist in the vocabulary of the Civil Service.

In the forthcoming split into two departments, I am sure that no senior heads will roll at the top where the grave problem lies, as the ranks will close to defend their magnificent status of no doers.

What government should be doing is bringing into the process high-powered managers from the private sector and changing the philosophy of doing nothing to one of constant change and the adoption of best methods from throughout the world.

The first thing to go would be the dynasties, where senior civil servants are not selected through the old-boy network and their family civil service backgrounds, but ones of selection by sheer merit.

Therefore not until government has the metal to take unreserved continuous action against these out-of-date departments and the senior civil servants in particular to task, nothing will change and where in many ways these wheels of government are constantly keeping the country back - and thereby its propensity to create wealth.

Indeed, in this century where we shall all see the vast transference of economic power from West to East, a responsive and proactive civil service will be vital for a nation's propensity to bear up in such a hostile socio-economic climate.

DR DAVID HILL, chief executive, World Innovation Foundation Charity, Bern, Switzerland.