For a civil servant schooled in the lore of the State, John Seddon’s views are tantamount to heresy. According to the outspoken management thinker, the established orthodoxy of the public sector — national targets, benchmarks, quangos, assessments — directed by the central “command and control unit” at Whitehall and championed in various guises by Thatcher, Major and Blair — are a damaging falsehood.

Conventional private sector wisdom, adopted by the public sector — outsourcing and shared services — is “wasteful and pointless”. But his new way promises, tantalisingly, to save taxpayers billions of pounds, make citizens happier and services run like clockwork — by scrapping the entire “systems and inspections industry” that holds the public sector in its grip.

“Targets always make performance worse. They are arbitrary measures which distort people’s thinking and sub-optimise the system,” Mr Seddon says, citing the notorious target to treat A&E patients within four hours which led doctors to treat patients with minor conditions before the more seriously ill or injured.

These anachronistic views of how the public sector should operate are starting to cause a stir. An opinion piece he wrote in the local government press calling for the Audit Commission to be scrapped provoked the commission into launching a caustic personal attack, describing him sarcastically as a “prophet” with “incontinent views”.

Mr Seddon appears stung by the criticism but is unsurprised that his ideas meet with fierce resistance at the top. “There is a lot of interest in maintaining the status quo.” He repeats his call for the Audit Commission to go, adding that “most of the Department for Communities and Local Government and other inspectors such as Ofsted” should also be axed. He believes that the system is working for neither the public nor the employees.

He says that polls show that “public services are not working and everyone knows they are not working”. And the target culture is demoralising and dangerous for staff: “When [the inspectors] go, you feel empty. It’s no surprise we had six teacher suicides at the time of Ofsted inspections. That is the tip of the iceberg. Why is there such huge turnover of nurses and social workers?”

Mr Seddon is also angered by the council star ratings system, which he says, bears little relation to the quality of services. “Haringey Council was rated 4-star at the time of Victoria Climbie and Baby P’s deaths.”

It would be tempting to dismiss Mr Seddon as merely another consultant with a product to sell — if his standing in the sector were not so high. A former psychologist who has worked with a number of councils, a petition calling for him to become a public services tsar has collected 1,200 signatures. Scores of online comments pay tribute to him in almost evangelical terms. Several are from local government officials admitting anonymously that Audit Commission inspections lead them to “game the targets”.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountancy, found that councils each spend £1.8 million a year proving their compliance to regulators.

Mr Seddon advocates what he calls “systems thinking” — designing services entirely to meet the demands of local customers. “When you learn to run your organisation better you don’t get a five per cent improvement, you get a huge improvement, 40 per cent or more. I know councils that mend five times as many potholes as others, with no more people.” But do citizens not all want roughly the same thing, hence national standards? “Councils serve vastly different areas. They need to use real measures derived from the customers’ point of view, not targets dreamt up by bureaucrats to justify their own existence.”

Mr Seddon rejects the term “best practice”, replacing it with “better practice” because, he says, each problem requires its own solution. He believes that the focus on best practice has caused “the worst ideas from the private sector to be copied in the public”. He cites the “absurd” decision to outsource British Council jobs to India and the Budget announcement that £15 billion will be saved by outsourcing more back-office functions. “All my private sector clients are coming out of India because it is actually more expensive,” he says.

With the political wind blowing in a different direction, would he be tempted to take up a position as an adviser to David Cameron, leading his “bonfire of the quangos”? Mr Seddon brushes off the question, saying, “I don’t think they’d offer me the job” before qualifying that any position would have to be “entirely on his terms”.

The rhetoric is polished, bordering on indoctrination. He claims to reject ideology in favour of evidence, yet refers repeatedly to his “teaching”, even a “new world”. “When you learn to design services against demand, everything gets better. Wouldn’t you be excited if someone opened your eyes to something you’d never seen before?” A new orthodoxy? “I’m not in the business of writing scriptures. I’m in the business of helping people to think,” he says bluntly.

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