Civil servants are being sidelined by ministers desperate to hand public funds to big businesses that too often fail to deliver, a committee of top MPs said yesterday.

Members of the Commons liaison committee called for a parliamentary commission to investigate the Civil Service following a series of high-profile contracting fiascos, which have shown there are "systemic failings" in the way Whitehall spends public money on big schemes.

The committee, which regularly questions Prime Minister David Cameron, cited the collapse of the tendering process for the West Coast rail franchise and the universal credit, G4S and Serco debacles.

It rounded on the coalition for its plans to reform the Civil Service into "a smaller, more open and flexible organisation" - warning that ministers are only listening to what they want to hear.

Committee chairman Sir Alan Beith said: "Public service contracts with the private sector need to deliver good quality services and value for money for the taxpayer.

"We have raised specific concerns about the paucity of commercial skills and officials feeling unable to speak truth to power."

Members of the committee backed a recommendation made by the Commons public administration select committee (PASC) that the government should ask Parliament to set up a commission on the same lines as the parliamentary group on banking standards, which would report back before the 2015 election.

"Why is there so much churn at the top of Whitehall so that most lead ministers have been in place longer than their senior officials?" asked PASC chairman Bernard Jenkin.

"The government has no vision for what sort of Civil Service we need for the 21st century and we need one."

Civil servants' union PCS supported the committee's call, saying the Tory's privatisation agenda was handing over governance to big business.

A PCS spokesman said: "Tory cuts have absolutely nothing to do with making the Civil Service run more effectively or efficiently and everything to do with shrinking the size of the public sector and our welfare state and handing lucrative contracts to big business, despite the consistent failures of these companies to provide a proper service."