£100k payoffs to civil servants in bid to save cash
HUNDREDS of Scottish Government workers have been awarded six-figure payoffs for quitting their jobs.
The ‘golden goodbye’ payments have been given to civil servants and other public sector staff as the Government tries to save money by cutting its workforce.
Yet, incredibly, official statistics show there are now more civil servants working north of the Border than when the expensive redundancy drive began in 2009.
A total of 290 workers pocketed cash lump sums of £100,000 or more over the past six years, while an elite handful were awarded more than £250,000 each.
Overall, 3,274 workers have been offered redundancy deals since 2009-10 costing taxpayers £141 million – an average of £43,000 each.
The gold-plated payoffs have been offered to staff since 2009-10 because the Government has pledged it will not force any worker to leave their job through compulsory redundancy. That means bosses have to offer attractive deals to entice staff to accept redundancy.
Last night Scottish Conservative finance spokesman Murdo Fraser said: ‘Of course contractual agreements have to be kept when people leave organisations. But the Scottish Government ought to have been far more careful when arranging who was leaving and what level of redundancy that would incur.
‘If the taxpayer shells out too much in redundancy deals, it makes cutting staff no longer a cost-effective move.’
The payouts hit a peak in 2010-11, when 1,039 staff were awarded £49 million, but fell in the following three years.
However, the figures started to rise again in 2014-15, when 264 people were given deals worth £11 million, compared to 169 people receiving £7 million in 2013-14. Over the past six years, 290 members of staff have had their pockets filled with six-figure payouts, including four workers who received a windfall of more than £250,000.
Eben Wilson, director of the Taxpayer-Scotland pressure group, said: ‘These generous payoffs are extremely expensive for ordinary taxpayers.
‘Normal companies in the private sector often pay only one month for every two years’ service. These costs show just how important it is to constrain the state.’
The main point of offering generous redundancy deals to staff is to cut workforce numbers and staffing costs.
However, official Government figures show that 17,700 civil servants were working in the devolved public sector in the second quarter of this year – which is 200 higher than the 17,500 total in the second quarter of 2009.
The latest redundancy figures do not include any payout to the recently-departed Permanent Secretary Sir Peter Housden – Scotland’s top civil servant – who retired earlier this year. They also do not include lump sums paid out through the Civil Service pension scheme when members retire.
The latest Government accounts put the cost of its pension scheme at £404 million last year.
Yesterday a Scottish Government spokesman said the figures covered a total of more than 155,000 staff and represented only 0.17 per cent of the total pay bill in 2014-15.
He added: ‘The costs being reported are not what individuals actually receive in their exit packages. That is because there are costs borne by the employer that are additional to the payments made, such as bringing forward pensions.’
‘Very expensive for ordinary taxpayers’