Scottish Government civil servants are being moved from a hybrid-working system in which office attendance was explicitly described as a target rather than a mandate to one in which attendance will be required and individually recorded.
Staff were informed of the change on 6 October, with the new arrangements expected to take effect from 9 November. Employees below the Senior Civil Service are expected to spend 40 per cent of their working time in person, while senior civil servants are expected to reach 60 per cent.
The most significant change may not be the percentage.
Until now, the Scottish Government has repeatedly said that it did not monitor individual compliance with the 40 per cent target. It monitored buildings instead.
Under the new arrangements, staff have been told that they will have to record where they are working through a self-reporting system. Civil servants discussing the announcement publicly say that system will operate through Oracle Cloud, the Government’s central human-resources platform.
The full internal guidance had not been published on gov.scot at the time of writing, so the precise fields to be recorded, how long the information will be retained and how managers will be permitted to use it are not yet publicly documented.
This is potentially the point at which Scotland’s hybrid-working policy changes from measuring whether government buildings are occupied to creating individual records.
The Previous Policy Was Deliberately Not a Register
The Scottish Government introduced its 40 per cent hybrid-working target in October 2025.
It was deliberately constructed as an expectation rather than an individual attendance mandate.
An FOI response published in February 2026 could hardly have been clearer. Staff in hybrid-compatible roles were expected to aim to spend 40 per cent of their contracted time working in person over a four-week period.
That did not necessarily mean two days sitting in the same office every week. In-person activity could include meetings, field work, training, conferences and meetings with customers or stakeholders.
More importantly, the Government said monitoring was conducted at building level rather than at individual or team level.
It also said the 40 per cent figure was “not a mandate” and that falling below it, by itself, would not be treated as a disciplinary matter.
That position was still being defended before the Scottish Parliament in March this year.
Permanent Secretary Joe Griffin told the Public Audit Committee that the Government did not know how many of roughly 9,000 core civil servants were meeting the 40 per cent expectation because it was not monitoring individuals.
When pressed on why the Government could not produce compliance figures, Griffin explained that not monitoring individual employees “on a taking-a-register basis” had formed part of the agreement with the trade unions.
The Government was therefore knowingly operating a hybrid-working policy that it could assess through building occupancy but not through individual attendance records.
The new arrangement appears to cross that line.
Oracle Was Already Holding Where Staff Were Supposed to Work
Oracle Cloud already occupies an important position in this system.
Scottish Government hybrid-working terms show that an employee’s contractual workplace is recorded in Oracle Cloud.
If somebody changes role and moves location, that contractual location is supposed to be updated in Oracle. Where an employee believes the location recorded there is wrong, the Government’s own guidance requires the location to be corrected following approval through the relevant management process.
Oracle therefore already holds the official answer to one question: where is this employee contractually based?
If the new self-reporting system also records where that person actually worked on particular days, the nature of the information changes.
The Government would potentially possess both the expected location and a continuing employee-generated record of actual working location.
That does not automatically make the system improper. Employers routinely keep attendance and timekeeping information.
It does mean that Scotland should be clear about exactly what is being collected and why.
The Government Previously Said It Did Not Have This Information
The change becomes more striking when compared with what the Government said less than a year ago.
In November 2025, an FOI applicant asked what proportion of the civil service was meeting the 40 per cent target, how many employees were attending one day or less each week, and whether employees expected to attend in person had instead been working remotely throughout the year.
The Scottish Government could not provide the information. Its reason was not that the data were confidential. It said it did not hold them. Building occupancy was being monitored to understand use of the estate, but individual attendance was not.
That meant a badge swipe might contribute to understanding how busy St Andrew’s House was, without being transformed into an individual performance record showing whether a particular civil servant had met a monthly attendance quota.
The new self-reporting arrangement potentially creates the dataset that previously did not exist.
Building Occupancy Had Already Increased Without Individual Monitoring
The Government’s own evidence shows that workplace use was already rising under the less intrusive arrangement.
When Griffin appeared before MSPs in March, he said occupancy at St Andrew’s House in Edinburgh had risen from 34 per cent in February 2025 to 60 per cent in February 2026.
At Atlantic Quay in Glasgow, he said occupancy had risen from 57 per cent to 68 per cent over the same period.
Those are measures of building utilisation rather than percentages of individual employees complying with the attendance policy, a distinction the committee repeatedly drew out.
But they show that office use had increased substantially in some major buildings even though employees were not individually registered against the 40 per cent target.
The Government has not yet publicly demonstrated whether moving from aggregate occupancy data to individual reporting is necessary to achieve a further increase.
This Comes as Government Is Shrinking Its Offices
There is a second tension in the policy. The Scottish Government has spent several years planning its estate around the assumption that hybrid working allows it to occupy less property. Its five-year organisational plan, published only weeks before the new attendance announcement, says 14 buildings have been closed since 2023. It promises a smaller estate through to 2032. From 2026, the Government is also beginning the rollout of a new desk and facilities booking system specifically to support hybrid working.
The Glasgow estate project goes further. Official project material says the existing Glasgow estate is oversized for future requirements and that hybrid working creates an opportunity to consolidate five leased buildings into a single hub serving around 3,900 employees across the Scottish Government, Disclosure Scotland, Scottish Enterprise, Education Scotland and the Scottish Qualifications Authority.
The rationale includes a smaller physical footprint and savings resulting from hybrid working.
Elsewhere in government, similar changes are already occurring. Transport Scotland’s requirements at 177 Bothwell Street were reduced by 12,500 square feet as part of a public-sector co-location project. The Government says the wider arrangement is expected to produce around £15 million of savings and avoided costs over ten years.
The policy problem is therefore not as simple as telling employees to return to offices. Scotland has simultaneously been designing a public estate around fewer desks, shared buildings, hot-desking and employees working part of the week elsewhere. A stricter attendance system has to operate inside that smaller estate.
The Government Had Already Considered Going Further
The question of increasing attendance has been circulating inside senior government for some time. Parliamentary evidence in March disclosed that senior officials had previously discussed whether Scotland should move from 40 per cent to 60 per cent attendance. Griffin told MSPs that UK Government departments were generally operating around a 60 per cent model and were monitoring attendance more rigorously. But he also explained why Scotland had taken a different approach. Going harder, he said, would risk conflict inside the organisation and with the unions.
That is significant in light of the October decision. The new system retains 40 per cent for most staff but apparently changes the character of the requirement itself, while senior civil servants move to 60 per cent. In other words, the Government does not need to increase everybody to 60 per cent in order to make the policy substantially stricter. Turning an aspiration into a requirement and recording individual compliance does that on its own.
The Data Question Is Now Unavoidable
If Oracle Cloud is being used to collect individual workplace-location declarations, a series of questions follows. The Information Commissioner’s Office explicitly includes technologies used for timekeeping and access control within its definition of worker monitoring. That does not prevent employers from operating such systems. It does require monitoring to comply with data-protection law.
ICO guidance says employers should identify why monitoring is necessary, establish a lawful basis, consider whether a less intrusive method could achieve the same purpose, tell employees what information is being collected and explain how it will be used.
It also advises employers to consider a Data Protection Impact Assessment, and requires one where processing is likely to create a high risk to employees’ interests. That makes the design of the Scottish Government system important. A simple declaration used to understand workplace demand is one thing. A permanent record accessible to managers and capable of feeding disciplinary, performance, promotion or workforce decisions would be something considerably more consequential.
At present, the publicly available information does not establish which model is being introduced. Nor does it establish who can see an individual’s attendance history, whether managers receive compliance reports, whether entries can be corrected, how long the records will be retained, whether information will be combined with building-access data, or what exemptions will apply to disability adjustments, caring responsibilities, field work and other agreed working arrangements.
Those questions should be answerable before the system goes live.
Oracle Is Becoming the Record of the Employee
This development also illustrates how quickly Oracle Cloud is expanding beyond the original description of a replacement HR and finance system. Oracle was introduced across the Scottish Government and 32 public bodies in October 2024. Its HR component serves a population of around 20,000 users across the shared service. It already contains employee records, contractual locations, sex and date-of-birth information, absence information and voluntarily supplied diversity data. It processes time and labour information, while the wider Oracle platform combines HR, finance and procurement.
The Government’s five-year plan shows that expansion is continuing. In 2027, it intends to replace the existing staff directory with an Oracle Cloud solution. It also plans an Oracle Cloud helpdesk for HR queries. The same five-year plan says the Government will use data to assess its hybrid-working policy and make the policy operate more consistently in practice. The arrival of individual workplace reporting therefore sits inside a much larger change in how Scottish Government employment information is collected and administered.
Oracle is moving closer to becoming the central record not simply of who works for government and what they are paid, but of how their employment is organised.
There Is a Historical Difference Between Attendance and Presence
Government has always kept records associated with attendance. Long before Oracle, Scottish Government systems could record flexitime, clocking activity and absence. Older service documentation describes systems through which employees could clock in and out electronically and managers could inspect timekeeping information. But hybrid working introduced a different concept. An employee may be working without being inside their contractual office. They might be at home, at Parliament, at another government building, in a community, at a conference, visiting a stakeholder or carrying out field work. That is why the original 40 per cent policy counted more than office presence. A self-reporting location system therefore has to distinguish physical location from whether somebody is actually working. If it does not, it risks turning a policy intended to encourage useful face-to-face activity into little more than an attendance counter.
The Change Arrives During a Wider Reshaping of the Civil Service
The timing is also notable. The Scottish Government’s five-year plan says the organisation is intended to become smaller. It is already restricting recruitment and reducing headcount through attrition, and the plan explicitly contemplated a voluntary exit scheme. On 7 October, the day after the hybrid-working announcement, civil servants were publicly discussing a new voluntary exit offer covering some senior grades.
At the same time, government is expanding its use of automation and Oracle Cloud, reducing its property footprint and changing the management structures through which staff work. Office attendance is therefore only one component of a larger restructuring of the machinery of government. The technology, workforce and estate programmes increasingly intersect. A smaller workforce is being placed into a smaller estate while more of its administration is concentrated into common digital systems. That makes the rules governing those systems more important than they might appear when presented as internal HR arrangements.
A Policy That Used to Avoid Individual Monitoring Is Becoming One That Depends on It
The Government has legitimate reasons to know whether its estate is being used and whether a hybrid-working policy is actually operating as intended. Its previous system, however, represented a conscious compromise. Employees were asked to aim for 40 per cent in-person working. Buildings were measured. Individuals were not registered against the target. Failure to meet 40 per cent was not, by itself, a disciplinary matter.
As recently as March, Scotland’s most senior civil servant explained that arrangement directly to Parliament. Seven months later, staff are being told that attendance will become mandatory and that where they work will be individually declared.
If Oracle Cloud is the mechanism through which those declarations will be recorded, the Scottish Government is about to add another category of employment information to a system that is already becoming central to the operation of government.
Before the new arrangements begin on 9 November, there is a straightforward public-interest case for publishing the guidance, the privacy arrangements, the data-retention rules and the exact purposes for which individual attendance information can and cannot be used.
Sources
Hybrid working 40% target statistics: FOI release
Scottish Government, 9 February 2026
https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202500492578/
Public Audit Committee Official Report
Scottish Parliament, 10 March 2026
https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/official-report/search-what-was-said-in-parliament/pa-10-03-2026
Hybrid Working Terms and Conditions
Scottish Government, released under FOI
https://www.gov.scot/binaries/content/documents/govscot/publications/foi-eir-release/2025/02/foi-202500447205/documents/foi-202500447205—information-released—annex/foi-202500447205—information-released—annex/govscot%3Adocument/FOI%2B202500447205%2B-%2BInformation%2Breleased%2B-%2BAnnex.pdf
Serving Scotland: Our Five-Year Plan
Scottish Government, updated 22 September 2026
https://www.gov.scot/publications/serving-scotland-five-year-plan/
Independent Assurance — Glasgow Office Estate Project
Scottish Government, released under FOI, 2026
https://www.gov.scot/binaries/content/documents/govscot/publications/foi-eir-release/2026/02-d/foi-202500494991/documents/foi-202500494991—information-released—document/foi-202500494991—information-released—document/govscot%3Adocument/FOI%2B202500494991%2B-%2BInformation%2BReleased%2B-%2BDocument.pdf
177 Bothwell Street, Glasgow — Single Scottish Estate Case Study
Scottish Government
https://www.gov.scot/publications/single-scottish-estate-case-studies/pages/177-bothwell-street-glasgow-case-study/
Scottish Government HR System Oracle Information: FOI Release
Scottish Government, 22 September 2025
https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202500468811/
Data Protection and Monitoring Workers
Information Commissioner’s Office
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/employment/monitoring-workers/data-protection-and-monitoring-workers/
Scottish Government Announcement — Civil Service Discussion
Reddit, 6 October 2026
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCivilService/comments/1wz007a/scottish_government_announcement/
