MOD staff make their presence felt at Civil Service Live

The event was the first ever of its kind dedicated to the UK Civil Service and was aimed at inspiring innovation and enterprise and enabling the sharing of best practice. More than 6,000 civil servants attended the event, representing every level of civil service grade, from departments, Government agencies and bodies based all over the country.

During the three days speakers included the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Business Secretary John Denham, former Home Secretary Charles Clarke and former England rugby team captain Matt Dawson. Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell made an appearance on each of the days to talk about innovation with Dragons' Den's Peter Jones in front of a live audience, and discussed the future with hundreds of civil servants during his keynote speech.

Permanent Under Secretary Sir Bill Jeffrey also spoke at Civil Service Live in his role as the Civil Service diversity champion. He urged Whitehall departments to "re-double their efforts" to make Government a more diverse organisation. He said:

"If we can achieve a service which is representative of the community from bottom to top then we will be stronger at what we do and do better at serving a diverse population. So this is something I personally feel passionate about and have done for quite some time."

MOD display stands reflected the event's theme of innovation and best practice as well as promoting the services the MOD can offer internally and across Government. Representing a wide cross-section of the Department's work were staff from the Met Office, GEMS (the Defence Ideas Scheme), Defence Equipment & Support's Information Systems & Services Commerical Services, the MOD Education Outreach Scheme, the Financial Management Shared Service Centre (FMSSC) and the Defence College of Management and Technology.

Kim Hill, at the FMSSC stand, said:

"I thought the event was terrific. It provided an opportunity for people to network and refresh their understanding of the Whitehall machine. But it also gave MOD a chance to show others what we do and the contribution we make. It was an opportunity for our FMSSC staff who work on different sites to network with each other as well as with people from other Government departments to share knowledge and best practice."

Building on the success of being shortlisted in the Public Value category at the 2007 Civil Service Awards, the Basra Political Advisor (POLAD) team, who were deployed in 2006/07, were specially invited to lead one of the ten National School of Government Learning and Development sessions and share their experiences of civilian support to operations. Fiona White, a former POLAD who led the session, said:

"The session went really well. Deploying on operations provides civil servants with some unique and valuable experiences which you can't get anywhere else and the audience were very interested in what we had to share. Some of the feedback from them afterwards said that they had found the session 'inspiring' and we hope it prompted them to think seriously about taking up opportunities in their own department to 'learn by doing something different' as well as helping OGD colleagues understand a bit more about the role of deployed civilians."