Discretionary Housing Payments in Scotland: 1 April 2025 to 30 September 2025
This publication provides information on Discretionary Housing Payments (DHPs) in Scotland over the six-month period from 1 April 2025 to 30 September 2025.
Information on applications, determinations, awards and total award value is included.
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Management information expenditure figures are for the actual spend on DHP awards for the 6 months from 1 April 2025 to 30 September 2025.
Chart 2 shows the proportion of DHP actual spend by award purpose. The majority was spent mitigating the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy (£36.7 million, 84.4%), with a smaller proportion used to support claimants affected by the benefit cap (£2.4 million, 5.6%), and Local Housing Allowance (£1.4 million, 3.2%). A further £2.8 million (6.5%) was spent on Core (non-welfare reform) awards and around £97,000 (0.2%) on awards that covered a combination of purposes (not labelled).
Chart 2: Management Information - Proportion of DHP actual spend by funding stream
Table 5 and Chart 3 show the total actual spend as a proportion of the estimated funding allocated for each funding stream.
Local authorities spent £2.4 million (26%) of their allocated funding for Benefit Cap mitigation. This expenditure is mitigating a similar proportion of benefit cap as was mitigated in 2024-25 (26%), although there is a wide range of take-up across local authorities.
Local authorities are free to spend their “Other” DHP funding at their discretion on any of the permitted purposes of DHPs, because they are best placed to respond to local housing needs. Allocations of “Other” DHP funding is therefore notional.
Local authorities have so far spent higher proportions than in 2024-25 for Local Housing Allowance (38%, £1.4 million), and also for Core funding (67%, £2.8 million).
Chart 3: Management Information - Proportion of estimated 2025-26 DHP funding spent (actual) by funding stream
Chart 4 shows the expenditure profile of each local authority. Whilst the Scottish Government provides funding under the different streams, for Local Housing Allowance or Core (or a combination of the two) this is a notional split and local authorities have discretion around how they use their funding. These have therefore been combined in this chart as ‘Other’.
Chart 4: Management Information - DHP actual funding spent by each local