Scottish civil servants who object to bus travel show just how out of touch they are

Gervais and Stephen Merchant created The Office, one of the UK’s all-time great TV comedies, a mockumentary set in a paper company in Slough. It chronicled the absurdities of office life, from petty bureaucracy to poor leadership.

A peak moment came in the first series, when Gervais, who played David Brent – a crass, attention-seeking office manager – livened up a staff training day with an impromptu dance. His cringeworthy dad dancing is an iconic moment in the history of British comedy.

The head of Scotland’s civil service, Joe Griffin, is no Ricky Gervais. To be fair, he’s not even a David Brent. He is too well paid for that role. But his performance at a Holyrood committee earlier this week was as vacuous as any of Brent’s inane utterings.

Lots of action?

Asked repeatedly by Michelle Thomson MSP when the Scottish Government was going to implement the recent Supreme Court ruling on sex and gender, Griffin responded with a jumble of excuses. He accepts the court’s ruling and is taking action.

What action? A range of actions, it seems, including a short-life working group to take stock of the actions required. He couldn’t specify any detail of the actions, as the group are still “preparing the ground” for future actions. There will be actions, but only when the time is right.

Griffin, who was only recently promoted to Scotland’s top government job, tried to pass the blame for his inaction to the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), claiming that he could not act until the equality regulator had concluded its review of the statutory guidance. An excuse that turns out to have less credibility than “Please sir, the dog ate my homework”.

Trans guidance for schools and prisons

In an exchange of letters between campaign group For Women Scotland (FWS) and EHRC, the latter’s head, Baroness Falkner, made it clear on June 20 – four days before Griffin gave his evidence – that the Scottish Government has already been told that there is no need to wait for guidance and should “be seeking to update their policies and practices in the light of the new understanding of the law…”

In other words, the Scottish Government can, and should, take action now to rescind two controversial documents: its transgender guidance for schools and the Scottish Prison Service transgender custody policy, neither of which comply with the Equality Act.

Perhaps more worrying for the Permanent Secretary is that, at a meeting on June 5, a senior civil servant told For Women Scotland and others, that the EHRC had advised the Scottish Government it must wait for the final code of practice to be published before taking any action – a claim contested by EHRC.

No doubt the Permanent Secretary has set up a short-life action group to work out how to respond to For Women Scotland’s request that the matter is now fully investigated “in light of the standards expected under the civil service code”.

Working from home

But first, he will have to find enough people in St Andrew’s House to staff it, and there he might struggle. Most of Scotland’s 9,000 civil servants work from home, scattered across spare bedrooms and office pods the length and breadth of Scotland. But under Griffin’s leadership that is about to change – or is it?

He told the committee that, from October, civil servants will be expected to turn up at the office at least two days a week. Cue shrieks of outrage from civil servants who, from the comfort of their sofa – sorry, home office – logged on to Saltire, the government’s internal communications system, to express their horror.

They raged about a breach of their civil rights, while making unreasonable demands for doing what they are handsomely paid to do, that is, turn up at work. Some asked that taxpayers subsidise their transport costs, others suggested the re-opening of the swimming pool at Victoria Quay, the government’s Leith HQ, as the price for their co-operation.

Taking the bus

My particular favourite, and the one that sums up the current civil service’s attitude to the rest of us, was the uncivil servant who expressed his fear of using public transport. “At least in the safety of my Fiat Tipo I’m not going to be sitting in someone else’s urine,” he said. As someone who, for five years, got a 27 bus to and from St Andrew’s House at least five days a week, I can safely say I never once sat on a seat soaked in pee, not even at 6.30am.

During my time in government, I also worked with some of the cleverest people in Scotland, some of whom remain friends to this day. Of course, there were time-servers, people whose only job was to book travel for their boss or senior managers in charge of ‘special’ projects, designed to keep them out of sight. But the culture was overwhelmingly rooted in old-fashioned public service.

Today’s civil service seems a different beast to what it was in 1999 or even 2009, and it is not just because there are far more of them. Since 2019, staff numbers in the Scottish Government core departments have jumped by 38 per cent.

Despite its claim to be collaborative and innovative, kind even, its organisational personality is a caricature of a progressive elite, divorced from the realities of everyday life. Historically high waiting times for cancer patients, the affordable housing crisis and an explosion of violence in schools may be the stuff that concerns you and I, but the focus of Scotland’s civil servants seems elsewhere – on themselves.

They may provide us with a few surreal moments, as Joe Griffin did this week, but it is no laughing matter. Our future wellbeing lies with these people.