Total cost of homeworking: FOI release

Information requested

Breakdown in the quantity of equipment purchased in moving civil servants to a homeworking routine, from February 2020 – present day, including:
1a) electronic equipment (e.g. monitors and printers)
1b) furniture (e.g. office chairs and desks)

Response

To assist with the shift to home-working the Scottish Government has purchased furniture and equipment for staff to use while working from home. Centralised purchases have been recorded from February 2020 to October 2021, the total number of these are shown below:

Equipment purchased	Quantity
Chair	652
Desk	172
Lumbar	294
Laptop stand / tablet stand / laptop riser	2,176
Headphones and webcams	86
Keyboard and/ or mouse	5,255
Cables	103
Monitors	32
Printer / Printer ink	131
Not specified / listed	29
TOTAL	8,930

Centrally recorded purchases include equipment and furniture ordered through the Workplace Division and expenses clamed back as travel and subsistence. Purchases made through centralised systems are included in the table above. Additionally, there are 30 centralised purchases that could not be broken down into equipment or furniture items, per the request.

Furniture and equipment may also have been purchased via electronic procurement card (ePC) by individual directorates and teams. These cards are used across the Scottish Government to purchase a variety of items including equipment purchased to facilitate home working. This information is not stored in a format which can be filtered to easily identify the specific transactions of this nature. To provide the data per the request, over 30,000 individual transactions would have to be reviewed, thus, exceedin the £600 limit.

Under section 12 of FOISA public authorities are not required to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying would exceed the upper cost limit, which is currently set at £600 by Regulations made under section 12. You may, however, wish to consider reducing the scope of your request in order that the costs can be brought below £600. For example, narrowing the timeframe of your request or requesting homeworking items purchased by a specific Scottish Government Directorate, a list of directorates can be found through the link shown below: https://www.gov.scot/about/how-government-is-run/directorates/ You may also find it helpful to look at the Scottish Information Commissioner's 'Tips for requesting information under FOI and the EIRs' on this website at: http://www.itspublicknowledge.info/YourRights/Tipsforrequesters.aspx

About FOI
The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.