Scottish Government remote working information: FOI release

Information requested

1. Does the Scottish Government make any assessment of the number of employees that work from home? Please provide this for each year since 2019-20.

2. In each year since 2019-20, how much has the Scottish Government spent on remote working equipment. (e.g. monitors, keyboards, chairs etc)?

Response

1. The Scottish Government (SG) has implemented a hybrid working policy which applies to the majority of our employees. Hybrid working arrangements ensure that colleagues combine working from home with a presence in a workplace (and for some roles, with stakeholders and in communities) each week and may vary from week to week depending on business need. Consequently, there are no centrally fixed mandated number of days that staff must work in the office per week, however there is the expectation that staff attend a Scottish Government workplace at least once per week.

As agreements on hybrid working are reached locally between the employee and their manager they are not recorded centrally. Therefore, whilst our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not hold the data that you have requested on the number of employees that work from home. This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested.

However, in broad terms, we can advise that from January 2020 to the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 the vast majority of staff worked all or most of their time at a Scottish Government location. From March 2020 to February 2022, in compliance with rules relating to Covid-19 all staff, except those who met essential worker criteria, were required to work all of their time from home. From February 2022 we first moved to a hybrid working model as part of our transitional response to the later stages of the pandemic, and this was formally confirmed as our long-term operating model in May 2023 as outlined above.

2. All of the information you have requested is available from - Scottish Government employees working from home queries: FOI release - gov.scot. Under section 25(1) of FOISA, we do not have to give you information which is already reasonably accessible to you. If, however, you do not have internet access to obtain this information from the website(s) listed, then please contact me again and I will send you a paper copy.

About FOI

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