The head of the civil service is publicly setting out plans to reform pay and benefits and attract more women and people from ethnic minorities.

Cabinet Secretary Sir Richard Wilson's announcement on modernising the civil service is unusual partly because it will be delivered in public to journalists, although cameras will be banned at the briefing.

The review came at the request of Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is understood to be frustrated by the old fashioned way he perceives the service to operate.

This view was echoed by Labour MP Peter Bradley, who accused civil servants of standing in ministers' way.

"Their job really is to deliver the policies that government develops based on a mandate rather than frustrate them and really I think civil servants' instinct for self-preservation often gets the upper hand," he said.

The administration is often dubbed the permanent government, carrying out its will irrespective of its political masters.

The world depicted in the television comedy Yes, Prime Minister, in which the cabinet secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby effectively tells the prime minister what to do parodied this perception.

But civil servants consulted in the process complained about the increasing politicisation of their job and increasing demands for them to display "vision" rather than implement planned measures.

Anthony Seldom, co-author of The Power of the Prime Minister, supported the argument the reforms could damage the independence of the civil service.

He said: "This is much more about the attainment of New Labour's goals and being able to present the electorate in 2001 or 2002 with a set of policies which have all been fulfilled than with the longer-term interests of British government and good, effective and impartial government."

But Lord Levene, a former permanent secretary in the Ministry of Defence and one of the few top rank civil servants to have been brought in from the private sector, argued change had to occur.

"I found things people find difficult to believe," he said. "The quality of people in the civil service is second to none, that's why people outside try very hard to recruit them. They work extremely hard.

"But I think one of the problem is that the system as it is designed now creates a large number of problems for itself."

He named the two biggest difficulties as low pay compared to the private sector and an inability to work constructively with groups and companies outside the government machine.

Lord Levene also insisted ministers had to be permitted to bring in people at the highest level without interference.

The present government has faced criticism for increasing the number of special advisers appointed to help ministers.

"You've got to have the ability to move people in and out, as they do in France, without the accusation it's cronyism or whatever," Lord Levene said.

"I think every prime minister has to have the right people around him. I know the civil service is looking very actively at management, but in my view it is the people who count."