Scottish civil servants back into the office should be priority

She should have worked for the Scottish civil service because there, it seems, anything goes.

Post Covid more and more organisations have been bringing staff back into the workplace in the interests of business efficiency.

And yet last week it was revealed only 36 staff turned up for work at 9am one morning at one of the Scottish government’s biggest buildings.

Victoria Quay in Edinburgh costs £2.4 million a year to run and is designed to house 2,200 employees but at the start of the working day only 1.6 per cent of the workforce were present.

That is directly ignoring a decree from First Minister John Swinney that civil servants should be in the workplace at least 40 per cent of the time.

Scotland’s top civil servant admitted in March that attempts to monitor attendance to ensure compliance had been abandoned after some workers called moves to limit working from home an “attack on their human rights”.

Permanent Secretary Joe Griffin told MSPs that managers were not disciplining staff who refused to meet the 40 per cent office attendance request in case it caused “conflict” with the unions.

Back in May, Kenny Gibson, then SNP Convenor of Holyrood’s finance and public administration committee admitted the situation is unacceptable.

“I think many people watching this would be frankly bewildered that there’s no monitoring and that there doesn’t seem to be any repercussions if people just ignore policy,” he said. “I find that quite astonishing”.

Since then the situation seems to have got worse rather than better. The Scottish Government have now stopped publishing data on how often staff attend the workplace.

None of this would matter if our public sector was delivering and we were in a golden age of results driven performance. But we are not.

Productivity is the fundamental problem here. On average, Scottish Government staff are off sick 11 days a year, the second highest of any government entity across the UK and way higher than the private sector. Perhaps working from home isn’t good for physical or mental health after all?

All of this represents a huge challenge for Scotland’s recently appointed first Cabinet Secretary for Public Sector Reform Ivan McKee who’s been tasked with saving £1.5 billion from a bloated civil service which has grown by 35 per cent since 2019.

However with every challenge comes an opportunity. As the summer draws to a close, getting Scottish civil servants back into the office on the terms agreed should be Ivan McKee’s number one priority.

Not only will it be a more efficient use of the Scottish government’s vast buildings estate but it will bring benefits for local businesses as footfall increases. It will also send a clear signal that value for money for the taxpayers who fund all of this matters more than caving in to threats from the unions.

This is the first time Scotland has had a Cabinet Secretary for Public Sector Reform. If the title is to mean anything, getting civil servants back to the desks in the office where they are supposed to be is the very best place to start.