The Herald today with another context-free report to help us know if that’s a big amount and if we should be concerned about it. All things being equal, you might expect the total in England, for the same year, to have been, ten times higher, £32 million.
Only for Local authorities and the UK Government civil service, not including the NHS so lower than the actual total amount, the figure in England last year, was £680 million, more than 20 times greater, per head of population.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/01/04/golden-goodbyes-council-staff-surge-highest-pandemic https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/08/surge-civil-servants-handed-100k-golden-goodbyes
Other public bodies (e.g., NHS trusts, arm’s-length bodies) report exit payments in individual annual accounts, but no England-wide aggregated total for all public sector bodies in 2024/25 appears publicly compiled yet so the above figure is modest but, hey ho, let’s just use that.
Why the difference? Have the years of Conservative Government values and managerialism in England created a culture, unlike in Scotland, where such payments have been normalised? Grok says No. He needs some tutoring from an old Prof methinks.
Talking-up Scotland 
O/T but still on how England is a different country where the news media reacts to things differently – or not at all!
The following is taken from the transcript of a keynote speech given in the UK Parliament by Gareth Davies, the head NAO, to MPs and civil servants on 10 February 2026.
‘If you are in any doubt that timely and robust accounting matters in the public sector, the situation in English local government remains a cautionary tale. In many cases, backlogs of unaudited accounts going back several years are only being cleared by means of disclaimed audit opinions, so that we have no independent assurance about how local government spent billions of pounds of public money. (my emphasis)
‘Not only does this mean that a material part of the whole of government accounts is not assured, but also that local taxpayers are not getting the most basic form of financial accountability.’
If this had been said in a speech by the equivalent public servant in Scotland to MSPs and civil servants in Holyrood would it have been headline news rather than lost without trace in England’s news cycle?
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NAO = National Audit Office
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