Job quango pays £1.2m to get RID of workers

SCOTLAND’s job creation agency paid out a staggering £1.2 million in golden goodbye packages to senior staff last year.

Ten workers who left the quango were each handed between £90,000 and £100,000 – more than three times the average salary.

Scottish Enterprise said the exits were part of an ‘extensive reorganisation of its leadership team’.

It declined to identify those who received the payments, citing data protection laws.

But staff who have recently left the quango include former boss Lena Wilson, who was Scotland’s highest earning quangocrat. She previously received £276,000 as chief executive of Scottish Enterprise.

Former managing director Adrian Gillespie also left last year.

Scottish Tory finance spokesman Murdo Fraser said: ‘Everyone underoffered stands contracts have to be honoured. But this is an SNP Government agency and this kind of largesse wouldn’t generally be repeated in the private sector.

‘This also suggests poor planning by the agency. Taxpayers will be furious that this amount of money has had to be spent in this way.’

Scottish Enterprise was set up to boost the economy, create jobs and support businesses. However, it has faced criticism.

It handed £3.3 million of taxpayers’ cash to Rockstar North, one of the world’s most successful video games companies. A further £1 million was to firms willing to do business with pro-independence Catalonia, seen as a kindred spirit by many Scots separatists.

The exit packages were revealed in the latest Scottish Enterprise accounts, which also show that 46 investments, worth £12.4 million, were abandoned or waived in 2018-19.

That included £1.5 million of accrued debts written off at troubled manufacturing firm Burntisland Fabrications, which has already received a total of £19 million from the Scottish Government.

Representatives of Scottish Enterprise are due to give evidence to the Scottish parliament’s economy committee on Tuesday as part of MSPs’ pre-Budget scrutiny work.

The next Scottish budget will be delivered in December.

In last week’s spending review by UK Chancellor Sajid Javid, he handed the Scottish Government an additional £1.2 billion boost for public services. The Scottish economy has struggled and tax revenues were £1 billion lower than forecast.

John O’Connell, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘This is yet another sorry tale of sloppy spending from Scottish Enterprise.

‘This is an organisation which has spent millions on lavish meals and hotels around the world at our expense and is seemingly conducting a quasi-foreign policy with bungs for Catalan firms.’

Scottish Enterprise said the voluntary severance packages were ‘in line with the Civil Service Compensation scheme’. A spokesman added: ‘We have restructured our leadership team. This included voluntary redundancy for 14 senior staff.’

‘Yet another sorry tale of sloppy spending’