An SNP ban on compulsory redundancy means 800 public-sector ‘ghost workers’ are on full pay even though their roles are gone

Saturday October 24 2026, 5.00pm BST,

Hundreds of public sector workers in Scotland are costing the taxpayer at least £27m a year because their jobs no longer exist and the SNP refuses to make them redundant.

A Sunday Times investigation has uncovered about 800 cases of NHS, central government, council and quango workers who no longer have a fixed role and who might ordinarily have been made redundant but remain on the public payroll. 

The cost to the taxpayer is expected to be far higher with several public bodies refusing to disclose salaries for hundreds of the workers awaiting redeployment. One NHS Highland worker has been receiving their full salary and benefits for 17 years despite not having a specific job any more. The health board refused to say what the worker had been doing for almost two decades and how much they had been paid. 

The analysis found some 255 public sector workers who had not had a fixed job for over a year and at least 49 who had been on a full salary for five years or more after the role they were hired for became obsolete. 

These “ghost workers” are placed in a redeployment pool while they wait until another role, typically with the same or similar pay and benefits, in their organisation opens up. 

Those with experience of the process have said that junior staff are often relatively easy to redeploy but it becomes harder for those on higher salaries in specialised roles if their positions are lost due to restructuring. Staff on redeployment are usually asked to carry out less senior roles or ad hoc duties while they await a new position rather than remaining at home. But critics say it is unclear what proportion of staff awaiting new jobs were meaningfully contributing to public services.

The “jaw-dropping” situation is a consequence of an SNP ban on compulsory redundancies in the public sector imposed in 2007. John Swinney, the first minister, has reaffirmed his commitment to a no-redundancy policy despite being under pressure to reduce the public sector workforce and tackle a projected deficit of £5bn.

The Scottish Conservatives demanded the Auditor General for Scotland, the public spending watchdog, launch an investigation into the findings. Craig Hoy, the party’s finance and local government spokesman, said: “Scotland’s public sector has become a gravy train for insiders with a ghost workforce of hundreds costing taxpayers millions every month.

“Some have been left languishing in zombie jobs for 17 years, a jaw-dropping indictment of a system completely out of control. The auditor-general must investigate this scandal and establish how taxpayers’ money is being squandered on a system that has been allowed to spiral out of control.”

In NHS Highland 88 workers were awaiting redeployment at the end of last month with 26 of them having been without a permanent role for five years or more. The health board refused to disclose the total salaries paid. 

At least four of its workers had been waiting for a new role since at least 2015 with one having been without a fixed position for 16 years and another for 17 years. It means one employee has been on full pay and benefits while waiting for a permanent job for almost the entirety of the SNP’s near two-decade tenure in power and nearly the entire length of the compulsory redundancy ban being in force. 

NHS Highland said it followed national policies and was “committed to supporting colleagues through periods of change”.

Other bodies who reported employing multiple staff without a fixed job for five years or more included Police Scotland, Scottish Water and NHS 24, Scotland’s equivalent of the NHS 111 service.

Valentin Boboc, a senior economist at the Institute for Economic Affairs, said: “Taxpayers deserve clear evidence that public funds are used to deliver value.” He added: “Whilst redeployment makes economic sense to retain skills and avoid the cost of recruitment, a guarantee that no one can be compulsorily made redundant simply puts the cart before the horse. Ministers should be free to give managers the flexibility to retrain, redeploy or reduce the number of staff to ensure taxpayers get the best quality and cost for the services they want.”

The total cost to the Scottish NHS of employing workers with no permanent jobs to go to is £1.4m a month, or £16.8m a year, based on figures provided for 315 workers; information was not disclosed for 185. The sum is roughly equivalent to the cost of sending 1,100 patients for knee replacements at private hospitals, or carrying out 2,850 of the procedures within the health service. Scotland’s NHS has been grappling with years-long waiting lists and routinely misses targets set by the government.

NHS Scotland introduced a new policy on redeployment last year saying it was “committed to retaining employees” especially when they were “displaced” or found themselves unable to continue in the jobs they had been hired to carry out. It says that in most cases access to redeployment provisions should be limited to just three months, though this can be extended, especially in cases where they have been “displaced due to organisational change”. They should be given “meaningful duties” while waiting for a new post, the policy says. 

In cases where a job is lost due to “organisational change” workers will receive their previous salary even if they are permanently redeployed to a more junior post.

Professor Alan Boyter, a former senior HR director with four decades of service in the NHS, said use of redeployment pools made sense as it could avoid the extra cost of making workers redundant and potential liability for premature pension payments. However, he said the existence of “outrageous” and “unacceptable” cases in which workers spent several years on full pay without a permanent role showed in many cases the system was not working as intended.

“Paying off qualified and experienced healthcare workers when the NHS is under strain and they could do a job elsewhere wouldn’t make sense,” he said. “If there’s a staff nurse job you don’t need any more but there’s a staff nurse job in the ward next door it makes sense for everyone to transfer them, so the problem isn’t the theory of the process; it’s the length of time that some people are finding themselves in these circumstances. 

“If staff are spending five years on a redeployment register that is just poor management. Anything like 17 years is outrageous and a serious management failure.”

Boyter said NHS workers on redeployment would typically be asked to fill a lower-grade role while remaining on a higher salary until a more appropriate post came up. If this was not possible they could be allocated to a department facing staffing pressures and asked to help out in any way they could. He called for tighter rules on how the process works in practice.

“In my view there should be clear rules such as that if someone turns down three offers of suitable alternative employment without reasonable cause they lose their rights to salary protection and take the rate for a lesser-paid job they are doing,” he said. “Staff should not be on redeployment registers for more than two years without having been made offers of suitable alternative jobs.”

Councils are not bound by the no-redundancy policy in Scotland and some operate strict rules on how long workers can remain employed while waiting for new roles to come up. 

In Aberdeenshire, for example, the length of time a worker can await redeployment is tied to their length of service, up to a maximum of 12 weeks. If no new role is found by the deadline employment is terminated. Other local authorities offer far more generous terms. At East Dunbartonshire council all but seven of the 39 workers waiting for new jobs on its redeployment register have been without a role for two years or more including three who have been without a fixed job for seven years.

The annual cost to Scottish councils of retaining surplus workers is estimated at £5.8m including salary, pension and national insurance contributions. This would be roughly equivalent to the cost of hiring about 135 newly qualified teachers.

At least 70 public bodies in Scotland responded to freedom of information requests by The Sunday Times asking how many staff were awaiting redeployment. Many provided the monthly cost of retaining the workers awaiting redeployment but others did not. Of those that supplied figures £2.3m per month, or £27.6m a year, was being spent on salaries and other employment costs. 

That figure does not include the Scottish government, which also refuses to make staff redundant despite their job no longer existing, with its salary costs for retaining surplus civil servants between £2m and £2.4m per year as revealed by The Sunday Times last month. At least 32 of its workers were awaiting new roles as of June including 11 civil servants on salaries of at least £80,172 and up to £92,553 per year.

The Scottish government said: “Our policy for no compulsory redundancies remains. Public bodies are expected to ensure that they deliver value for money and to see that all staff including those who are redeployed are engaged in appropriate work for their pay scale. 

“For example the NHS has clear redeployment policies that helps boards to make use of staff with experience and expertise even while their posts may change. Public bodies manage their workforce through steps such as redeployment, attrition, vacancy management, reskilling and where necessary voluntary severance. These tools will form part of our work to deliver public service reform focusing on frontline delivery with the right staff in the right roles to deliver real improvements.”