Exactly this; the job of civil service is to retain institutional competence, and to offer cabinets digests and levers to pull that they can operate at high level.

Day one:

- your predecessor had this and this initiative, see pages 4 to 7 - i don't like that, what alternatives exist - we worked this up at the time, here are the projections which were updated six months ago - good, do that instead - we'll need to redo the numbers - then do so, and brief me again next week