Total spend on employing agency staff across the Scottish Government: FOI release

Information requested

Can you please provide the number of Agency Staff you have employed straight across all Departments within the Scottish Government and how much this costs, please break this down by each Department for the last 5 years.

Response

Please see below the spend for the core SG for the last 5 financial years. For 2020/21 this is not yet complete as we have not yet received and validated all of the final quarter management information.

Please note this spend is for the various iterations of the Temporary & Interim Staff Services Frameworks only it doesn’t contain any spend for Dynamic Purchasing System (DPS) or staff contracted through any other method as we have no visibility of that.

2016/17 - £15,983,178.54
2017/18 - £13,394,538.92
2018/19 - £21,384,623.73
2019/20 - £29,452,581.53
2020/21 - £28,339,702.46

Year	Quarter to end:	Interim managers	Temporary agency workers	Total head count of Agency workers
2017	Mar	77	151	228
	Jun	66	140	206
	Sep	61	141	202
	Dec	61	167	228
2018	Mar	72	195	267
	Jun	77	218	295
	Sep	74	214	288
	Dec	79	214	293
2019	Mar	79	198	277
	Jun	69	195	264
	Sep	67	200	267
	Dec	62	180	242
2020	Mar	73	173	246
	Jun	74	163	237
	Sep	98	199	297
	Dec	98	251	349

These figures are essentially lifted from our quarterly “workforce information” official statistics publication which is assessible using the link provided.
Scottish Government workforce information - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

Unfortunately we are unable to provide a breakdown by each department as we do not hold a central record of this.

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