Two Child Limit Payment costs: FOI Review

Information requested

Original request 202500497257

The total amount of money spent by the Scottish Government establishing and setting up the Two Child Limit Payment that it was planning to rollout from March 2026. including all costs incurred by the Scottish Government, including any costs incurred as a result of the policy no longer going ahead due to the decisions taken at the UK Budget 2025, broken down by each specific item that contributed to this overall cost.

Response

I have now completed my review of our response to your request under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) for:

The total amount of money spent by the Scottish Government establishing and setting up the Two Child Limit Payment that it was planning to rollout from March 2026. including all costs incurred by the Scottish Government, including any costs incurred as a result of the policy no longer going ahead due to the decisions taken at the UK Budget 2025, broken down by each specific item that contributed to this overall cost.

I have been asked to re-examine your request, to decide whether the original response should be confirmed, with or without modifications, as appropriate, or a fresh decision be substituted. I can confirm that I was not involved in the handling or decision-making around the original response. I have considered this case again, and have conducted a comprehensive review of the response, and the reasons behind withholding the requested information.

In accordance with section 21(4) of FOISA, I have reached a decision on your request.

Following a review of the original response, I have concluded that the original decision should be substituted.

Regarding the content of the initial response, I found that we were incorrect to apply section 25(1) of FOISA. This was applied because information relating to anticipated expenditure on developing the systems to deliver the mitigation of the Two-Child Limit was already publicly available, in the form of a published news release on the Scottish Government website. This news release refers to a specified amount, and was interpreted as addressing your request. On further consideration, that figure represented a commitment and not an accurate calculation of costs incurred to the date of your request, nor does it reflect costs incurred following the decision to not proceed with the policy due to the announcement of the UK Budget 2025. We apologise for this.

We acknowledge that you are seeking details of costs incurred to the date of your original request – 9 December 2025. While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested, and we are therefore unable to provide the cost figure. As such, this is a formal notice that an exemption applies. Under section 17(1) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) we do not have the information you have requested. The reason for this is as follows:

While expenditure associated with establishing and setting up policy development will have been incurred, no recorded information is held that presents those costs as a breakdown in any form.

As per our usual financial processes, the financial information is reviewed at year-end rather than being calculated on an ongoing basis. We cannot provide an update to the 2025/2026 financial expenditure until the year-end has concluded. At the time of your request, the analysis and calculations required to produce the information you requested has not been carried out. Section 17 (Information not held) of FOISA does not require public authorities to create new information, such as performing calculations, in order to respond to a request.

The Scottish Government publishes its annual accounts once the year-end process has been completed and the accounts have been finalised. These are then made publicly available on the Scottish Government website, https://www.gov.scot/. Additionally, I include a link to our previous years consolidated accounts report - The Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts for the year ended 31 March 2025 - gov.scot as an example.

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.