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The number of staff and grades required to support the delivery of Scottish Child Payment will depend upon an assessment of the impact of delivery of Scottish Child Payment, including staff resources. We will provide an update once the assessment has been completed.

In the first full year of payments to under 6’s (2021-22) policy costs are expected to be around £70 million, rising to £180 million in the first full year of full roll-out to under 16’s (2023-24). The total establishment cost of the new payment to the end of this parliament, including implementation and administration, is estimated to be in the region of £32.5 million (across 2019-20 and 2020-21).

The information provided on pages 2 to 5 of the policy position paper demonstrates how the options examined in the Analysis of Options report informed our policy choices. As set out in the policy position paper, ‘having taken into consideration both the policy modelling and analysis, the delivery and timing implications and the impact on the existing Social Security Programme, we concluded that a refined version of Option 2, as set out in the analysis report, is one that balances the risks against the benefits.’

The detail of our chosen policy approach and the associated costs are set out in the policy position paper. The option we are taking forward most closely corresponds to Option 2(b) in the Analysis of Options.

As set out in the Scottish Child Payment policy position paper, once fully rolled out (by the end of 2022) eligibility for the Scottish Child Payment will be on the basis of children aged under the age of 16.

As set out in the Ministerial statement on the Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan on 29 June, further work has been required to assess certain policy and delivery implications of the Scottish Child Payment.

As part of this work, we are considering a range of issues which includes assessment periods and verifying eligibility and entitlement. Our approach to this will be set out in regulations which we will submit to the Scottish Commission on Social Security in the autumn.

I refer the member to the answer to question S5W-25155 on 18 September 2019. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx .

The initial rate of the Scottish Child Payment, when the first payments are made in 2020-21, will be £10 per week, per eligible child. Its rate in future years will be informed by the approach we take to the uprating of the devolved benefits which we are currently consulting on, prior to the laying of the legislation in the Scottish Parliament in January 2020.

When it is fully rolled out, the rate of the Scottish Child Payment will be the same for all eligible children, in each age group.

Such a model was considered. It was rejected for a number of reasons, including the technical complexity of designing it, the resulting risks to delivery of the other devolved benefits, and the ongoing uncertainty around delays to Universal Credit migration, which would have meant that clients awaiting migration would not be eligible to receive the Scottish Child Payment unless additional interfaces with legacy systems were also built.

In introducing the Scottish Child Payment the Scottish Government prioritised the delivery route which would deliver the benefit to the quickest timescales and with the least impact on the remaining devolved benefits. The option of an automated delivery model for Universal Credit(UC), which would have required these additional interfaces with legacy benefits for those who had not yet migrated onto UC, was considered as part of our assessment of all potential options, and discounted following discussion with senior officials and Ministers as it was not deemed to be the best fit with this objective.

The Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018 provides for advocacy to be available to support people with a disability to engage effectively with the Scottish social security system.

If a young person has a disability and is applying for Scottish disability assistance in their own right then they will be eligible to seek advocacy support. A parent or carer will be able to seek advocacy support to assist with their disabled child's application for assistance if they themselves identify as having a disability or if the child or young person wishes an advocacy worker's support to ensure their own voice is heard.

As in 2011, the 2021 Census intends to collect information about the number of people who have “Deafness or partial hearing loss”, as well as demographic information that will provide age and location. A new question on BSL use is proposed for the 2021 Census. This will provide information about whether these people use BSL, for the first time in Scotland’s Census.

The Census does not intend to collect information about levels of hearing loss. National Records of Scotland received requests for many more questions than could reasonably be included in the census. In coming to a final selection of questions and question changes, some difficult decisions needed to be made between the benefits of different questions and question changes. The criteria used to make these decisions was published in April 2018.