For much of the past two decades, Scottish Government has been a growing organisation, taking on new powers and more staff. It’s now entering a period of contraction, and Griffin, who has worked in the organisation since 2004 and become its most senior civil servant, will now lead it through that change.
“Since devolution, we did grow – more or less doubled, actually – from 1999,” he says. Some of that was down to new powers being devolved to Scottish Government, social security being a significant example. Some of it, like the rest of the civil service across the UK, was in response to Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. “You then reach a point where ministers’ judgments about how much of public money to spend on the administration, versus how much to spend on alleviating child poverty or growing the economy, starts to shift.”
Griffin frames the change as more than a response to that pressure. “I also agree that it is right for us to be smaller, for the same reasons as ministers,” he says. “But also, because I think we’ll be a better organisation, and I think it’ll be a better place to work.” When you’re smaller, he explains, “you have to make quite hard-headed decisions about the breadth of the programme and have sensible conversations with ministers about what you can take forward.”
That means being willing to draw a line under legacy commitments from five or ten years ago that “have either been delivered or are not quite working out in the way they were anticipated” and looking to redeploy people and money elsewhere. It also means discipline about process. “I think we’re at quite an exciting time in the civil service about really thinking about the sheer amount of process that we risk inflicting on ourselves,” he says. “Some of which AI can take on some of the strain, and some of which just maybe doesn’t need to happen.”
Our organisation ultimately works, he says, in the service of Scotland, and contraction forces a sharper focus on that core purpose. “I really do think it’s an opportunity to create a better organisation, actually.”
Griffin is speaking to me having already met the FDA and PCS that morning, with a further session planned that afternoon with the FDA’s Scottish Government Branch, in conversation with FDA General Secretary Dave Penman. He describes the relationship with recognised trade unions as “one of our great strengths”.
“I genuinely believe unions, at a time of change, can help you shape that change, because they’ve got good ideas,” he says. “They bring to the fore suggestions from the workforce about how you might go about something, and they’re also important channels of communication from the employer to members, in ways that people will trust the communication and the channels that they get from union colleagues.”
He accepts that the word ‘reduction’ makes people anxious, and “that’s understandable”. But he wants to make the case for what the organisation becomes on the other side of it, and to be clear about how the process is being managed. The government reduced headcount by “just under five percent last year” through natural attrition, though he acknowledges “that still brings challenges”.
“Things like recruitment freezes are never easy, and I don’t want that in place for a five-year period,” he explains. “But we have associated with the pay deal commitment to no compulsory redundancies.”
The Permanent Secretary says he’s also exploring whether there’s other options that ministers may sign off around voluntary exits, but they’re “not in that position yet”.
What he’s asking of the unions, in effect, is help identifying what to stop doing. “People working in organisations are often the best judges of what those things are,” he says. “So, what I’ve said to both PCS and FDA is, ‘I want to hear what they are.’” His hope, he says, “is that we can get into a partnership where there’s a really good flow of suggestions of processes and bits of work which just don’t really contribute a huge amount, and we can stop doing them.”
It’s a message that will meet some scepticism from members who already feel stretched thin, being asked to do more with fewer resources while ministerial priorities don’t always shrink to match. Griffin believes the clarity of purpose the current First Minister has brought to the role should help.
“If you went around the building this afternoon, you’d get a pretty good return on people reciting what the First Minister’s four priorities are,” he says. “It’s eradicating child poverty, promoting economic growth, addressing Net Zero, and improving public services, particularly in the NHS.”
That clarity, he argues, makes it easier to move resources and people toward what matters most, and away from work that has slipped down the list — though it requires, in his words, “a sort of agility of deployment” done “with respect and in dialogue with people”.
The Scottish Government has been served by administrations led by the same political party since 2007. Many current civil servants will never have worked for a government of a different political complexion. I ask Griffin how the organisation keeps its impartiality, and its readiness to serve any party, genuinely alive under those conditions.
“It’s fundamental to our position in the democratic system that we’re able to respond to change of administration,” he says. “That’s just essential — the civil service is able to do that.”
The organisation prepared intensively for the most recent election, which Griffin is “pleased to say” went well. Preparation also meant staff conversations and gatherings of the senior civil service reaffirming the civil service’s “role within the system”. With the First Minister’s authorisation, officials also held access talks with several opposition parties — “an opportunity for us to have some conversations with opposition party leaders, and to absolutely reassure them of our impartiality and our ability to change if that’s what the electorate decided.”
The governing party was returned. But for Griffin, the value was in the exercise itself. “Every time you have the opportunity to exercise those muscles, you have to really take it,” he says.
Griffin joined the Scottish Government in 2004, initially for personal reasons rather than career ones. “My wife and I, we lost our first child — she was born in London, but very, very unwell,” he says. “We kind of did what you’re not meant to do in the midst of bereavement, which is just decide that we wanted to change our lives completely.” His wife had been brought up in Scotland, and the move was partly about being nearer her family.
The change required him to relearn a set of skills, as he’d spent the first part of his career as a diplomat. His first role for the Scottish Government was in urban planning, a subject he says he “knew absolutely nothing about”, but one that turned out to be an ideal way to learn about Scotland, “because planning is about communities, and it’s about how you use land for the benefit of people”. He credits his first boss, the chief planner Jim Mackinnon, with teaching him “how you build a community with the people that you work with”.
That experience shapes how Griffin thinks about hybrid working today. He’s encouraged colleagues to come back and work more with each other since the pandemic, having felt that some of that community was lost during COVID-19 and its aftermath. “It’s essential for learning from each other, supporting one another,” he says. “Given that we all have tough times in our lives, I would want for anybody to be supported in the way that I was, after a bereavement and a fairly major lifestyle change.”
On the systems that support hybrid working itself, he’s unambiguous: “That technology is amazing, and it’s a wonderful substitute for being in person. But I think it is a substitute. I don’t think we can base our entire working practices on looking at each other down a screen.”
Griffin traces three lessons from his earlier career as a diplomat, including a posting in Paris, that he carries into the Permanent Secretary’s role. The first is a resistance to what he calls attribution error — assuming that another institution behaves the way it does “because they’re bad actors”, rather than recognising that people generally act rationally within their own context and motivations. The second is “an intense curiosity about place”, something he traces back to hearing football scores as a boy for teams like Stenhousemuir and Queen of the South, and which he still applies to communities across Scotland today. The third is a belief in negotiation as a shared act of problem-solving rather than a haggle.
“It’s looking at something together,” he says. “We invest in our relationship, so we understand each other, and we’ll try and problem solve based on a common approach. That’s the way that you get good outcomes, ultimately.”
Griffin closes on what he sees as the “inherent strengths of a devolved system”. Every Thursday, every director in the Scottish Government will be in the same room for an hour, in a forum he says has “an unbelievable ability to cascade messages, to get joined-up working, to get the input of directors into organisational direction”. The week we spoke, that room had hosted the Deputy First Minister; a few weeks before, the First Minister himself; the day before, a Scottish Leaders’ Forum bringing sector leaders from around the country together.
“I just believe that we’ve got to go hell for leather for these things,” Griffin says. “Because our competitive advantage is our agility, how networked we are, how relational we can be.”
Whatever shape the next few years of contraction take, that’s the case Griffin keeps making — to unions, to ministers, and to staff: that a smaller Scottish Government will not mean a less effective one.
FDA members ‘In Conversation’ with the Permanent Secretary
FDA General Secretary Dave Penman was joined by Scottish Government Branch members at St Andrew’s House on 25 June for our ‘In Conversation’ event with the Permanent Secretary Joe Griffin.
In an opportunity to have a frank conversation with senior leaders, members raised a wide range of issues, including the Capita pensions crisis, SCS empowerment, psychological safety in the workplace, performance management, more flexible deployment of staff and prioritisation [and de-prioritisation] of workloads.
A key challenge facing Scottish Government is recruitment controls. Even with a commitment to no compulsory redundances, Griffin acknowledged many civil servants will still be left asking ‘how am I going to cope?’ if they can’t replace people in their team or they’ve got more work to do when the organisation is 20% smaller.
He accepted that with a contracting workforce “we can’t do everything” and urged FDA members in attendance to identify unnecessary work to help with a programme of deprioritising.
“Let’s get to a place where we can be a smaller organisation, more focused, more smart about how we work,” he said. “And I think that’ll be a better place to work in, actually.”
If you’re a member in Scottish Government and have thoughts or concerns about how recruitment controls are affecting you and your team, the Branch wants to hear from you. Please share your experiences via FDAConvenor@gov.scot
AI and more human public services
When it comes to AI, the Permanent Secretary is wary of adopting it for novelty’s sake. “The risk is that you get some quite cool tech that you play with,” he says. “What we actually need is a kind of beginning-to-end: what are we trying to achieve, what are the benefits, and how do we sequence the adoption process so that we’re clear we’re getting those benefits?”
The bigger prize, for Griffin, is what AI could do to free up civil servants for the parts of the job that machines can’t do. “The great promise of it is to humanise a lot of what we do,” he says. Government administration involves a lot of process, much of which “lends itself quite nicely to AI”, with a human still “in the loop” for quality assurance and to check against hallucinations (where AI returns misleading or false information presented as fact). The gain, he says, is in productivity — and in the time it creates for “really good management, really good line management, really good stakeholder relationships”, and more time for civil servants to be out in Scotland’s communities.
“I’m particularly passionate about the potential that we have in Scotland to be out and about,” he says. “If you’re working in health, you can get to go and see a GP practice in Aberdeen, or you could visit a hospital in Kilmarnock. And you can talk and listen to communities about the way that they’re experiencing public policy.”
Although it might sound “slightly counterintuitive”, Griffin thinks that “the great strength of all the tech and AI stuff is it makes us all much more human organisations”, which he passionately believes is needed in the 21st century.
However, he acknowledges that rewiring the state will not be an easy task, because “the wiring is quite complex”. You need your housing appointment at the housing office and your jobs appointment at the jobs office, each kept rigidly separate. AI, he believes, could do much of that work behind the scenes, so the first question a citizen is asked is ‘what do you need?’, rather than being confronted with a bureaucratic process. “
“AI and its deployment in pursuit of much better, personalised public services, I think it’s hugely exciting.”
If Prime Minister Andy Burnham wants a different political culture, he needs to start with the Ministerial Code says Dave Penman.
After comparing the results of our recent carers’ survey with our findings from 2020, Amelia Dowler shares the positives as well as the FDA’s recommendations to help carers within their civil service careers.
This year’s FDA Group Impact Award was presented to the union’s Ofsted Branch. The branch had been nominated for the award in recognition of the work that went into the ‘Beyond the Framework: The people behind inspections’ report and campaign.
