There is a remarkable contrast between two important stories of UK policymaking. We describe the Westminster story as the ‘official’ account based on widely accepted (but often misleading) assumptions about the way the UK’s political system operates. It emphasises strong central leadership and top-down control by senior policymakers, underpinned by majority party control of Parliament in an adversarial political system (Richards & Smith, 1992; Rhodes, 2011). We describe the Complex Governmentstory to synthesise the accumulated wisdom of academic policy studies, which emphasises a gap between the official story and reality. There are profound limits to the resources and powers of ministers in central government, they are surrounded by a complex policymaking environment over which they have limited control, and they rely on a much larger number of actors who contribute to UK policymaking processes (including the devolved governments in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and.
