Policy officials’ second-order legal consciousness and its influence on the design of policies at the UK Ministry of Justice

Policymakers in central government are responsible for designing and maintaining an array of public services. Working together with their key stakeholders, policy officials sculpt a policy from its early outline to its eventual implementation. The aim of this paper is to analyse central government policy officials’ ‘second-order legal consciousness’ – that is, their beliefs about their stakeholders’ understanding of the law – and its impact on policymakers’ decisions. This paper draws on data from 12 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with civil servants in the UK Ministry of Justice, focusing on their perceptions of some of their stakeholders’ views of the law. The data reveals policymakers’ second-order legal consciousness regarding their frontline colleagues, government ministers, Parliament, and the courts, and crucially, how this informs policy design. Much of the existing literature examines frontline operational officers’ legal consciousness, and its impact on ‘law in action.’ However, this research demonstrates for the first time that policy officials in the UK Civil Service exhibit a second-order legal consciousness in relation to some of their key stakeholders during the policy-making process. This paper begins to fill an important gap by examining the impact of this second-order legal consciousness on law-making and implementation. Finally, this paper concludes by considering the opportunities for further research on the impact of officials’ second-order legal consciousness on a range of public services.