Being a Councillor for over 10 years and dealing with Civil Servants all the time in local government, I found that there was a tendency to say no to what I would say was reasonable requests from Councillors to get problems solved, our civil servants hid behind previous decisions that the Council had made on certain issues years and years ago, and I found that only a small percentage of our civil servants would try and come up with a "lets see just what we can do" attitude to try and resolve some of the issues that I found myself dealing with.