Information in relation to Social Security Scotland staff who identify as belonging to a minority ethnic group: FOI release

Information request and response under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002

FOI Reference: FOI/202500488774
Date received: 13 October 2025
Date responded: 7 November 2025

Information requested

Request for information 1:

What percentage of Social Security Scotland staff identify as BAME and what is their Civil Service grade or grade-equivalent?

Request for information 2:

How many promotions have been for BAME staff and what grade is the promotion from/to?

You asked for this data to be provided for the last 24 months and to be broken down by department.

Response

Request for information 1:

Information on the ethnicity of Social Security Scotland colleagues is voluntarily provided via a self- service section on our HR system.

As of June 2025, 5.5% (231) of directly employed colleagues selected a minority ethnic category. This includes the following categories:

• Mixed or multiple ethnic groups
• Asian, Scottish Asian, or British Asian
• African, Scottish African or British African
• Caribbean or Black
• Other ethnic group

The full breakdown of directly employed colleagues by ethnic group is as follows:

• White – 61.7%
• Minority ethnic – 5.5%
• Prefer not to say – 1.6%
• Unknown – 31.2%

The “Unknown” category refers to colleagues who have not completed their ethnicity declaration.

Further details are available in our most recently published workforce statistics to June 2025, available here:

Social Security Scotland workforce statistics to June 2025

Table 1: Percentage of Social Security Scotland colleagues who voluntarily identified as belonging to a minority ethnic group, by Scottish Government grade and division (as of June 2025).

Table 1 only includes grades with non-zero counts of staff with declared ethnic diversity. The 'Grade total' includes all grades.

The grades A3 – C2 refer to Scottish Government grades which are used in Social Security Scotland.

Request for information 2:

An exemption under section 38(1)(b) of FOISA (personal information) applies to some of the information requested because it is personal data of third parties. Ethnicity is classed as Special Category Data under the UK GDPR. If the information were broken down by grade or division, this could potentially identify individuals.

Disclosing this breakdown would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018. This exemption is not subject to the ‘public interest test’, so we are not required to consider whether the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption.

However, we can provide the following information:

• Between June 2023 and June 2025, there have been an estimated 550 promotions within Social Security Scotland.
• Of these, 21 colleagues had a diversity marker indicating they identified as minority ethnic.
• This figure is based on the number of colleagues who moved from a lower to a higher grade. Some promotion scenarios - such as multiple grade changes in quick succession - may not be fully captured.
• Ethnicity data is collected through a voluntary self-declaration on our HR system. Of the estimated 550 promotions, 158 colleagues either selected “Prefer not to say” or have a status of “Unknown”.  

About FOI

Social Security Scotland is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. The Scottish Government also publishes responses to requests. You can view the responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.