Adult Disability Payment waiting times and proportion requiring consultations: FOI release

Information requested

I  request the following information regarding waiting times for ADP:

Request 1: From January 2023 onwards, what was the average length of time from the submission of part 2 to a decision being (made)?

Request 2: From January 2023 onwards, what was the average length of time from the submission of part 2 to a decision being made when no further evidence or information was required from the applicant?

Request 3: What proportion of applications are currently requiring consultations in order to make a decision?

Response

In providing a response to your request, we have interpreted your first two questions to relate to Adult Disability Payment (ADP) Part 2 applications which were received from January 2023 onwards.

Response 1: The median average number of working days for an application with a part 2 submitted on or after the 1st of January 2023 as at the 25th March 2023 was 29. Processing times for any application received are calculated between the received date of the part 2 application and the date that a decision was made regarding the application, or the application being withdrawn. The processing times are calculated in working days.

Some applications are excluded from this analysis as follows:

applications that had a decision but did not possess a part 2 application date

applications made under the Special Rules for the Terminally Ill as those applications don’t require a part 2

redetermination or appeals

Please note that to answer the question this analysis has been calculated using only those applications with a part 2 submitted on or after the 1st of January 2023 and as such not all applications had been processed by the 25th March 2023. As a result this median average processing time is not representative of all applications submitted between the 1st January 2023 and the 25th March 2023.

The Adult Disability Payment Official Statistics publication provides further information on processing times by the month that the decision was made. The most recent publication covers up to 31 January 2023 and is available here:

https://www.socialsecurity.gov.scot/reporting/publications/adult-disability-payment-high-level-statistics-to- 31-january-2023

The upcoming publication due to be released on the 13th of June 2023 will include information covering the months to April 2023. It will be available on our statistics publication page here:

https://www.socialsecurity.gov.scot/about/statistics/social-security-scotland-statistics-publications

Response 2: No information is held. While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance Social Security Scotland does not have the information you have requested. This is because we do not have data to this level of detail.

Response 3: Based on the information that we have available since the Adult Disability Payment pilot commenced in March 2022, we cannot know what effect a consultation had on the outcome of the decision making process. We are able to identify that of all Adult Disability Payment applications that were processed by 25 March 2023, around 5% had a consultation with one of our Health and Social Care Practitioners. It should be noted that this data is drawn from management information, which has not been quality assured to the same level as that in our Official Statistics publication. As such, this figure should be interpreted with caution.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.