Social Security Scotland - Scottish Child Payment statistics: FOI release

Information requested

Please can you provide a table showing the following information regarding families claiming the Scottish Child Payment (SCP).

Your request for information 1: The number of eligible children in each family ranging from four to 10 and over inclusive

Your request for information 2: The number of families claiming SCP for each of the family sizes listed in (1)

Your request for information 3: The SCP income per family

Your request for information 4: The total cost of the payments made to families for each family size

You asked us to refer to the below table published by the Times in March 2026 when considering your request:

Source: The Times (March 2026) Scottish Child Payment - large families

Eligible children	Families claiming SCP	Income per family	Cost to taxpayer
4	6,211	£5,647.20	£35,074,759.20
5	1,511	£7,059.00	£10,666,149.00
6	377	£8,470.80	£3,193,491.60
7	108	£9,882.60	£1,067,320.80
8	30	£11,294.40	£338,832.00
9	17	£12,706.20	£216,005.40
10+	7	£14,118.00	£98,826.00
		TOTAL	£50,655,384.00

Response

Response to your request for information 1:

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 hold information on the number of eligible children.

We do not hold information relating to the number of eligible children in each family ranging from 4 to 10 years old and over inclusive. This is because we only hold information on children actively in receipt of Scottish Child Payment at a given point in time. See the information presented for (2) below.

This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that Social Security Scotland does not have the information you have requested.

Response to your request for information 2:

The below table represents the number of parents or carers with 4 or more children receiving Scottish Child Payment (SCP) as of 31 December 2025:

Number of children actively benefiting from SCP	Number of parent or carers in receipt of SCP
4	5,941
5	1,422
6	350
7	116
8	30
9	9
10 plus	4

This is the most up to date information held at the time of your request on 10 March 2026.

Response to your request for information 3 and 4:

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 Social Security Scotland only hold information for Scottish Child Payment which shows each parent or carer’s eligibility at the time of data extraction.

The eligibility information is subject to change as entitlement changes, for example a child may age out of eligibility. The extracted information does not allow identification of when each child was added to, or removed from, individual payment cases.

The information provided is a snapshot at a point in time. It does not show that these clients remained in receipt of Scottish Child Payment for a full year, or that the number of children that a client is receiving Scottish Child Payment for remains constant for an entire year.

The “income per family” and “cost per family” figures included in the table you referenced from The Times were not provided by Social Security Scotland. Social Security Scotland has not validated the data published by The Times, makes no assessment of its accuracy, and is not able to provide the information presented in that table. The data we hold does not show this.

This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that Social Security Scotland does not have the information you have requested.

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.