Social Security (Amendment) (Scotland) Bill: child rights and wellbeing impact assessment - updated April 2025

Analysis of the evidence

How have the findings influenced the development of the relevant proposal?

The findings have informed understanding of children and young people’s experiences of using the social security system in Scotland. They have underlined the importance of collaborative working both within and outside of the Scottish Government to ensure the best outcomes for child and young people who come into contact with the social security system.

The Scottish Government has assessed the re-determinations and appeals provisions against each of the indicators of wellbeing as set out by the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 and concluded that they are likely to have a positive impact for young people.

For the proposal to introduce challenge rights for decisions on overpayment liability the findings informed the policy development and the decision to formalise in legislation the existing informal processes for challenging liability. This has the positive effect for all individuals (including children and young people) of ensuring that any liability challenge will come with a right to a review followed by a right to appeal to the First-tier Tribunal for Scotland (Social Security Chamber).

One of the key issues raised during the consultation and development of the proposal to recover social security assistance from compensation awards was that claiming compensation can be a long and challenging process for the injured party, and that the addition of a compensation recovery procedure would add further complexity, negatively impacting the injured party – who could be a child or young person. To address this, the proposal puts the obligation of repaying any amounts owed to Scottish Ministers on the compensator not the injured party. Although the injured party will be provided with a copy of the information requested by the compensator in relation to the amounts of recoverable benefits received, there will be no requirement to do anything.

Another concern raised about this policy was that the injured party should not have the entirety of their compensation payment recovered by Scottish Ministers. To prevent this, the proposal ringfences compensation amounts awarded for general damages such as pain and suffering making them unrecoverable. This, in effect, will ensure that children and young people who have incurred an injury or illness due to a liable third party will receive any compensation awarded specifically for damages such as pain and suffering or mental anguish. Following on from the responses from the public consultation, the proposal was designed to target compensation awarded for loss of earnings, cost of care and loss of mobility as the purpose of the benefits received by the injured parties is to mitigate these same losses.