Government ‘not monitoring’ civil servants over return to office, MSPs told

The Scottish Government is not monitoring civil servants to see if they are complying with a policy that requires them to work from the office at least two days a week, MSPs have been told.

Permanent Secretary Joe Griffin, who heads the civil service in Scotland, insisted the Government was not “taking a register style approach” to the policy.

It comes after the Government introduced the policy of having civil servants work in the office at least two days a week from October last year.

Mr Griffin, who has previously insisted the move to more office working is “the right thing to do”, said an agreement with trade unions meant they could not monitor individual staff to see if they were complying.

He told MSPs that there had been “certain constraints in how we have gone about this, but added that not monitoring individual staff was something the unions felt strongly about”.

He spoke out as MSPs on Holyrood’s Finance and Public Administration Committee voiced frustrations about staff not returning to the office.

Committee convener Kenneth Gibson said: “Do people not like working with their colleagues, the banter and all that thing? It’s not healthy to sit in your house all the time working.”

He stated: “We’re only talking about two days out of a five-day working week.

Questioning why this was seen as “onerous” by some civil servants, he added: “Pre-pandemic everybody worked in the office, did they not? It was just taken for granted this is where you worked and you turned up Monday to Friday and did your shift.”

Pressing the Permanent Secretary over the monitoring of the policy, Mr Gibson said: “I would have thought you would be monitoring that to see whether some departments had 100% of people coming back two days a week and others if it was lower, you would be wanting to see why is that not happening, what are the issues that are preventing people from returning to work.”

Scottish Conservative MSP Craig Hoy also asked about monitoring and if there had been any cases where disciplinary action had been taken as a result of a failure to return to office working.

“That, of itself, would not in itself trigger a disciplinary measure,” Mr Griffin said.

He added that there had been “a long period after Covid where there was no real determined approach to get people back in the office”.

Mr Griffin said after he came into post the executive team “took the decision quite early on last year that we needed to change that”.

The minister stressed this was “for positive reasons” with the return to the office “not intended as a punitive measure to check up on people or to make sure that they were working”.

And while he stressed the Scottish Government is “not monitoring individuals” he said there had been an increase in occupancy rates in government buildings.

At St  Andrew’s House in Edinburgh, which he said was  “generally regarded as the flagship Scottish Government building” building occupancy has gone from  34% in February 2025 to 60% in , Feb 2026.

Meanwhile the Scottish Government’s Atlantic Quay office in Glasgow has seen building occupancy rise from 57% to 68% over the same period – though Mr Griffin said the changes in other government buildings had been “less significant”

But he insisted there had been a “palpable change in the atmosphere and the vibrancy” in offices, with the Permanent Secretary saying: “These are not trivial uplifts in the building occupancy rates that we are talking about.”