Scottish Child Payment queries: FOI release

Information requested

Request for information 1: By the month / year the number of new approved claimants for the SCP.

Request for information 2: The number of claimants who stopped receiving SCP because they were no longer eligible.

Request for information 3: The number of claimants within the total in (2) who stopped receiving SCP because their employment income increased, meaning they were no longer eligible.

Response

Request for information 1

We have interpreted claimants to mean an individual who is in receipt of Scottish Child Payment, or whose application was approved recently and expected to receive Scottish Child Payment.

Please see attached documentation which provides the answer to your request.

Note these numbers differ from the number of authorised applications in our published data, as one claimant can make multiple successful applications for Scottish Child Payment. The information provided in the table is based on (unpublished) secondary analysis of the most recently published statistics on Scottish Child Payment.

Request for information 2 and 3:

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving, and providing the information requested would exceed the upper cost limit of £600. The data extracts used for producing the published number of claimants in receipt of Scottish Child Payment only allow us to report at a point in time.

Therefore, a manual review of each case that was no longer in receipt of Scottish Child Payment, would be necessary to establish if this was due to eligibility, and if so to understand if this related to the category set out in request for information 3. For two points in time December 2023 and December 2024 alone, this would require a review of 19,117 cases.

Under section 12 of FOISA public authorities are not required to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying would exceed the upper cost limit, which is currently set at £600 by Regulations made under section 12.

Due to the volume of cases, it is unlikely that you would be able to reduce the scope of your request so that the costs can be brought below £600. You may however want to review our statistics on Scottish Child Payments below and reframe your question around the statistics we do capture.

You may find it helpful to refer to our latest publications which contains a range of information on Scottish Child Payment.

Social Security Scotland - Scottish Child Payment statistics to 31 December 2024

About FOI

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

FOI 202500457435 - Information released - Documentation

File type

PDF

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83.0 kB