Number of civil servants employed by the Scottish Government: FOI release

Information requested

Details of how many civil servants have been employed by the Scottish Government on this date in each of the last five years, with a breakdown of which department they worked in.

Response

The data has been extracted from Scottish governments HR systems and is in line with the latest published official workforce statistics available here Scottish Government workforce information - gov.scot (www.gov.scot). The data is based on the position as at 30 June of each year from 2020 to 2024.

The table below provides a breakdown of these statistics and shows the full time equivalent number of directly employed Scottish Government staff by Directorate General area.

The HR system is an administrative database. As such, it is continually updated when workers join and leave the Scottish Government and personal details change. As with any large scale administration system, it may be subject to errors with data entry and processing, and short delays in processing changes to the data. Therefore there is a possibility that there may be out of date data errors presented, as the “snapshot” may be taken at a point before records are updated or corrected. We are currently in the process of replacing our HR administrative systems. This process of replacing our systems has limited the number of organisational changes made in the HR system which may also have an impact on the quality of data presented.

FTE, Core Scottish Government Directly Employed Staff by DG, June 2020 to June 2024
DG	Jun-20	Jun-21	Jun-22	Jun-23	Jun-24
DG Constitution and External Affairs	529	369	.	.	.
DG Communities	.	898	995	1,114	1,107
DG Corporate	.	1,679	1,921	2,055	2,233
DG Education, Communities and Justice	1,313	.	.	.	.
DG Economy	2,597	2,706	708	550	562
DG Education and Justice	.	768	902	926	949
DG Health and Social Care	693	1,112	1,330	1,256	1,219
DG Net Zero	.	.	2,195	2,249	2,272
DG Organisational Development and Operations	1,853	.	.	.	.
DG Scottish Exchequer	134	141	132	148	153
DG Strategy and External Affairs	.	.	484	442	417
All	7,119	7,674	8,666	8,739	8,911

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.