Introduction

A key role of the civil service is to develop policy advice to ministers (Dowding 1995) and then administer its implementation, frequently through others including local authorities and agencies. In the core function of policy making, training and development of civil servants has been less important than their initial recruitment into the Senior Civil Service (SCS) and subsequent acculturation. The civil servant's duty of ‘investigation … as preliminary to action’ (Haldane 1918 quoted in Hennessey 1989: 297) remains a guiding principle. Richards (1997) argues this was eroded during the 1979– 97 Conservative governments, although he states that criticisms were made of individuals rather than the civil service as a whole. Blair, as an incoming Prime Minister in 1997, assumed that the civil service would find difficulty in changing focus from the previous administration (Blair 2010), not least as there had been legendary spats between Labour ministers and civil servants (Castle 1973; Crossman and Howard 1991).

While there have been many studies on improving policy making to support delivery (Brans and Vancoppenolle 2005), improve the use of evidence (Stevens 2011) and perform better in comparison with other countries, particularly within the EU (Hood et al 2002), the civil service has maintained that its central legitimacy is to provide advice to ministers (Polsby 2001). The role of the civil service in working with other EU member states in developing UK policy between 1972 and 2020 created a different style of negotiated and transactional policy expertise which may suggest a change in skills in the post-Brexit period (Richardson 2018; Diamond 2023a).