If civil servants aren't carrying out government policy satisfactorily, then they will be responsible to the minister in charge. But a minister can't sack them, not directly, anyway. This is why the UK government paid out £400k to a civil servant abused by Patel, after he was forced to resign and then took the govt to court.

In this case, we're talking about a new procedure for investigating harassment complaints, retrospectively, which appears to have been brought in to stop Alex Salmond getting a toehold back in Holyrood. Leslie Evans regularly reports to her actual boss in Whitehall, Mark Sedwill. The Salmondistas will obviously join the dots there and say the conspiracy could have originated in Whitehall as Evans wouldn't have came up with it herself. And i'd agree with them.