FOI/202500482083 · FOI · released
Scottish Government agency staff spend: FOI release
Information requested
Please provide a breakdown of the total spending by the Scottish Government on agency staff for the years 2023-24 and 2024-25 to date, separated by:
Directorate Grade equivalent of staff hired Length of contract (less than 6 months, 6–12 months, over 12 months)
Response
I enclose a copy of some of the information you asked for but advise that these are separate data sets for cost data and workforce numbers and necessitate being considered as such.
Your enquiry focused on ‘agency workers’. Our response has therefore focused on sharing data on ‘contingent workers’ (those who are not directly employed by the Scottish Government).
The two data sets relating to ‘contingent workers’ have been extracted from different systems and therefore can not be viewed as inter-related, due to dependency on different hierarchical structures and definitions of contingent worker. This data does not provide a comparable view of the costs attributable to the contingent workforce listed.
In relation to your request to provide the data set broken down by department, we are providing this by ‘DG Family’, which reflects the Scottish Government departmental hierarchy. The Scottish Government implemented an Oracle Cloud enterprise resource planning system in Autumn 2024, replacing our legacy HR and Finance systems. Though the data capture of temporary workers remains an area requiring some further development, the implementation of a combined HR and Finance system will improve the data we hold on workforce costs.
Additional Notes re Workforce Data
For the purposes of published data, the definition of contingent workers includes consultants, contractors, interim managers, inward secondments/ SLAs, temporary workers, short-term youth initiatives and a category ‘other’.
Breakdown of spend for 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 can be found in Annex A
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.