An important factor that I don’t think has been mentioned so far is that for quite a while the opposition have been engaged in “access talks” firing which they have been receiving all the same briefings as the government, allowing shadow ministers to be fully up to speed. They have also been able to develop a working relationship with civil servants, and to discuss their policy priorities with those civil servants.
As such both ministers and ministries should be able to hit the ground running. It helps that Labour’s chief of staff was until recently a senior civil servant herself, and several ministers were previously in government under Blair and Brown.
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