Upper management doesn't have to be trained engineer. However immediate direct management of development team definitely have to be trained engineers to be comp

Upper management doesn't have to be trained engineer. However immediate direct management of development team definitely have to be trained engineers to be competent. Also, a good manager should detect if a team contains a few "dead weights". It eventually always lead to frustration from more competent team members and this is something that can be detected and addressed if you talk to your team members. The only thing that may be difficult for managers in the public sector is firing people unless they are contractors. I don't know how it works in the UK but I have worked in gov agencies in another european country and firing someone who was just working badly (to the point of wasting time and energy of others) was almost impossible. And sometimes upper management would throw unfit people in your team just because they needed to put them somewhere. I had a few time wasters in some of my team that had been put in our team by the unemployment agency. Basically they had spent money on them taking "classes" (which were just Microsoft certification classes) and threw them at us while most of them weren't even interested to begin with. You really had to do direct fault to be fired and it would take months or even years. The only one I have seen being fired was a project manager who booked fake meetings to go play golf during office hours.