Nature quango lets staff work from home... in India, Iceland and Chile!
A quango has allowed staff to work abroad nearly 140 times in the past three years for reasons including ‘family events’.
Employees of taxpayer-funded NatureScot have worked remotely from countries including Iceland, Chile, Hungary, Spain and India.
The public body – which receives £89.4million a year from the SNP government to improve the natural environment – said overseas working was allowed for up to 30 days each year.
Scottish Tory business spokesman Murdo Fraser described the situation as ‘absurd’.
He said last night: ‘Of all public bodies, you’d expect NatureScot’s staff to be based here – unless there’s an exceptional reason for distant working. Taxpayers don’t expect the civil servants they fund to deal with Scotland’s environment to be habitually operating from the Costa del Sol or India.’
Perthshire-based NatureScot, formerly called Scottish Natural Heritage, is led by chief executive Francesca Osowska.
Her total remuneration in 2023-24 was £119,125.
In response to a query under freedom of information laws, Nature-Scot said staff travelled abroad to attend conferences.
Some staff were in India, home to the Taj Mahal
However, they could also work overseas if they were attending family events.
There were 137 approvals for employees working abroad between 2022-23 and 2024-25 in countries such as
Finland, Denmark, Germany, the US, Croatia, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
Information was withheld about the roles of those who worked abroad where they ‘cannot be sufficiently anonymised, because releasing personal data into the public domain… would breach the Data Protection Act 2018’.
There were 11 approvals in 2022-23, rising to 63 in 2023-24 and another 63 for 2024-25.
The figures come amid a growing row over remote working for public sector staff. It emerged in 2023 that the Scottish Government had allowed 32 employees to work from other European countries – or even further afield – leading to accusations that bureaucrats were spending their days on sun loungers rather than at their desks.
It emerged last year that town hall bosses across the UK had approved at least 731 staff requests to work from abroad in 2023-24.
A NatureScot spokesman said: ‘Staff working abroad were either attending meetings and conferences – such as the Unesco Panel meeting for the Flow Country World Heritage bid, the AEWA European Goose Management working group, World Protected Areas Leaders Forum and World Water Week – or due to personal circumstances such as family events and bereavements.
‘Although NatureScot’s policy allows staff to work abroad for personal reasons for a maximum of 30 working days over a 12-month rolling period, in the vast majority of cases staff are away for less than a week.’
