Chamber and committees

This information was provided by Citizens Advice Scotland. Performance information on the Financial Health Check Service will be submitted to the Scottish Government on a quarterly basis. We have not yet received the first performance report.

Make the Call is an established service aimed at benefit take-up. It is not comparable to the Financial Health Check Service which goes further by offering free personalised advice for people to help them reduce household outgoings by tackling the poverty premium where they may be paying more than they need to for basic goods and services.

Official statistics, covering the first months of applications for the Best Start Grant, will be published in April 2019. More detailed analysis will be published in a quarterly publication series starting from August 2019. In line with the Code of Practice for Statistics, care will be taken to ensure that these publications are produced to a level of quality that meets users’ needs. Published data will be subject to disclosure control methods to protect the confidentiality of the data. There will be scope to analyse redeterminations made, processed and the outcomes, if we are satisfied with the quality of the data and can safeguard the confidentiality of individuals.

The current Social Security Programme Senior Responsible Owner, who was also Senior Responsible Owner for each review, was approached prior to the Cabinet Secretary publishing the response.

There is no current intention to publish the reviews.

Each review has been lodged with the Programme and Project Management Centre of Expertise (PPM-CoE) and copied to the relevant Accountable Officer.

The reviews are confidential to the Senior Responsible Owner and have been shared with select internal colleagues.

The November 2017 review was shared with the Social Security Programme Board.

The two child limit is a UK Government policy which the Scottish Government has repeatedly called for to be scrapped. The changes announced by the UK Government last week show that it too now finally accepts that the policy is unfair. It should therefore scrap the cap for all families.

The Scottish Government plans to spend over £125m in 2018-19 mitigating the impact of UK Government welfare cuts and on measures to help protect people on low incomes. In 2020/21 UK Government cuts including the two child cap are expected to take around £3.7 billion out of the Scottish welfare system- with £92m in 2020-21 due to the two child limit and the Scottish Government cannot be expected to continually mitigate to fill that gap.

It is the policy of the Scottish Government to continue to call for the two child limit to be scrapped for all families. The Scottish Government would not request information from the DWP on mitigation as this is not an SG policy.

The Scottish Government has very limited administrative flexibilities over Universal Credit. These are laid out in the Scotland Act 2016, giving Scottish Ministers the power to change when and to whom Universal Credit is paid, and to vary the amount of housing costs included in the award. We have used these to good effect by introducing the Universal Credit Scottish choices. This does not, however, change the fact that Universal Credit remains reserved to the UK Government and with it the two child limit policy which we do not have the power to remove.

Having top up powers doesn’t mean we can change the benefit. The two child limit and rape clause will remain in place because these are the policy choices the UK Government has made and it is only right that they are the ones to take action to fix this.

I refer the member to the answer to question S5W-20880 on 24 January 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 .