Balloons, Buckets and Plastic Ducks ‘Help Cut Crime’

The priorities of the Scottish Executive justice department has been questioned after £25,000 of public money was spent on helping staff master the art of juggling chiffon scarves.

Two hundred crime-busting civil servants also used their “mega away day” to play with balloons and fish plastic ducks out of buckets.

The activities are recorded in the latest issue of the Executive’s in-house magazine, Scoop, which notes the “mammoth group outing”, which took place in Edinburgh last September, was organised by justice head Robert Gordon.

In a previous life, Gordon was the civil servant in charge of the £431 million Holyrood project, which was completed four years late and 10 times over budget.

The away day, which involved the “entire justice department”, started with a TV-style interview between Gordon and justice minister Cathy Jamieson, entitled When Robert Met Cathy.

After lunch, bureaucrats participated in an exercise called Quickfire, in which staff were encouraged to “team build by constructing a tower out of balloons”. This was followed by justice mandarins being drilled in “bell ringing, rubber ring assembling, plastic duck fishing and learning to juggle with chiffon scarves”.

Included in the Scoop feature was a photograph of Gordon wrestling with a red piece of chiffon, as well as a picture of a blindfolded man trying to scoop a plastic animal out of a green bucket.

The event cost £21,091 (plus VAT), which took the overall bill to £24,782, the equivalent of funding six places on the now-defunct Airborne initiative.

It also involved taking the best brains of the justice department off their frontline duties for a day.

Embarrassingly for the Executive, the jaunt took place two days after it was revealed that reported rapes had risen by 5% and drug crime was found to have jumped by 6%.

But staff believe the day out made a positive contribution to team building. In typically bureaucratic fashion, Scoop noted: “The When Robert Met Cathy video came out well, as did the Post-It notes exercise. That came up with a top 10′ of issues which have been subdivided between group heads to progress.”

However, opposition MSPs struggled to find a link between scarf juggling and making Scotland crime-free.

Kenny MacAskill, the SNP justice spokesman, said: “Team building is one thing, but taking the mick at the public’s expense is another. There has to be some strategy and some focus. This appears to be too much of a jolly and not enough about addressing justice.”

Conservative finance spokesman Derek Brownlee said: “The justice department has to work effectively, but how playing with chiffon scarves and balloons helps is difficult to see. I think the morale of the department would be better if they felt they were making a difference to their area of responsibility. These types of activity bring the whole government into ridicule.”

A Scottish Executive spokesman defended the event, saying: “We make no apology whatsoever for investing in staff development through away days and other team-building exercises.

“We have made great progress in improving the justice systems and reducing crime, but it remains important that civil servants are encouraged to think beyond their immediate policy areas if we are to continue to deliver better results for taxpayers.

“Anything which helps to improve the way our committed professional staff work together to improve the service to the public is a contribution to our goal of a safer Scotland.”