Take-up Rates of Scottish Benefits: October 2025

Take-Up Strategy Update

Overview

Our current Benefit Take-Up Strategy, published in 2021, remains central to our efforts to reduce barriers to accessing entitlements and ensure that financial support reaches those who need it most. Over the past year, the Scottish Government and Social Security Scotland have continued to deliver on actions to improve benefit take-up, guided by the Strategy’s five core principles.

The following section sets out the actions taken over the past year, in line with each of the five Benefit Take-Up Principles. Together, they demonstrate our shared commitment to building a person-centred, inclusive and collaborative social security system that supports people to exercise their right to financial assistance.

Principle 1: Prioritise person-centred approaches

Designing a person-centred social security system means listening to those most affected by barriers and acting on what they tell us. To uphold commitments in the 2021 Benefit Take-Up Strategy, the Scottish Government commissioned independent research in 2024 to better understand the experiences of seldom-heard groups. This included an evidence review of the seldom-heard group landscape and a Citizens’ Panel on stigma, facilitated by the Poverty Alliance. The findings showed that many persistent barriers—such as stigma—are shared across communities, and that system-wide interventions may be more effective than group-specific actions. In response, the Scottish Government and Social Security Scotland published the Seldom Heard Groups Action Plan in August 2025, setting out practical steps to improve engagement and access. Actions currently underway include:

• Enhancing Social Security Scotland’s Equality Impact Assessment process to include seldom-heard groups within diversity and equalities considerations. This includes updating guidance on the Equality Impact Assessment process, setting out seldom-heard group needs and perspectives, ensuring their experiences are considered in the development of processes and services.
• Working with representative organisations to gather feedback on benefit take-up approaches, ensuring designs of future policies such as the Two Child Limit Payment and next Benefit Take-Up Strategy are informed by lived experience.
• Social Security Scotland is building trauma-informed practices into service delivery by training frontline staff. An initial trial of a new learning package will guide wider implementation across Social Security Scotland.

While the Plan will be implemented over 12 months, its insights will shape the next Strategy, due by October 2026, which will continue to embed a human rights-based, person-centred approach.

Principle 2: Communicate and engage effectively

Clear and inclusive communication is essential to ensuring people are not only aware of the financial support available to them, but also feel confident and empowered to access it. Social Security Scotland’s communications activity plays a central role in raising awareness of benefits, encouraging applications, and tackling barriers such as stigma. By clearly explaining who is eligible, how much support is available, and how to apply, communications help people understand the real-life impact that benefits can have.

To reach a wide range of audiences, a mix of channels—including media relations, social media, stakeholder engagement, and paid-for marketing—is used to deliver messages in the right places, at the right times, and in formats that work for different communities. Accessibility and inclusion are embedded throughout this work, with information materials available in 13 community languages, British Sign Language, Braille, and over 100 languages on request. A digital English as a Second Language resource, including translated factsheets in 13 languages, has also been shared with schools to support parents facing language barriers. These efforts ensure that people can engage with content in the way that best suits their needs.

Targeted communications and partnerships further strengthen outreach to seldom-heard communities and help shape more responsive services. This includes engagement and training with Lanarkshire Deaf Hub and the Royal National Institute of Blind People to better support clients with hearing and visual impairments, and collaboration with healthcare professionals to deliver information sessions on special rules for terminal illness. Campaigns such as the Carer Support Payment advertising—developed with Carers Trust and Minority Ethnic Carers of People Project (MECOPP) —and outreach through community radio stations like Awaz FM and Jambo Radio have helped reach ethnic minority and rural audiences. The Pension Age Disability Payment campaign, launched in September, was shaped by user research with older people, their carers, and third sector organisations to ensure messaging was relevant and accessible. The campaign includes radio and TV advertising to reach those who may be digitally excluded. Leaflets and posters on Pension Age Disability Payment were also distributed to community locations across Scotland and key information and resources shared with stakeholders.

Together, these activities reflect a commitment to inclusive, person-centred communication that supports benefit take-up across Scotland—ensuring people not only know what support is available, but feel seen, understood, and supported in accessing it.

Principle 3: Bring Services to the People

Advice services play a vital role in supporting benefit take-up across systems. That is why, in 2025–26, the Scottish Government has committed over £16.9 million to fund debt, welfare, and income maximisation services. This includes investment of more than £610,000 in 2025-26 into Welfare Advice and Health Partnerships – which place Welfare Rights Advisors in participating GP surgeries – to support mainstreaming of this model by local delivery partners following completion of a successful Scottish Government funded ‘test-and-learn' pilot of the initiative. The purpose of this pilot was to build a robust evidence base to encourage local partners to embed this accessible advice model within local welfare rights and income maximisation services.

The Scottish Government subsequently launched the Advice in Accessible Settings Fund in 2023 to further embed advice services in places people already use. An initial £1 million investment was followed by £1.5 million in 2024–25, with a further £1.73 million committed in 2025–26—including an additional £250,000 to increase support for disability-focused projects. The fund supports partnerships between advice providers and a wide range of community-based services, including youth charities, housing and homelessness services, faith-based organisations, mental health services, carers support services, and disabled people’s organisations. These initiatives deliver holistic advice services, including debt advice, in education, health, and community settings. Since its launch in July 2023, the fund has supported over 13,000 clients and unlocked £27 million in financial gains, benefiting lone parents, minority ethnic families, disabled people, and families with disabled children.

Furthermore, the Scottish Government continues to fund the Independent Social Security Advocacy Service. This service has now supported over 12,000 people since its launch in 2022. The service offers free advocacy to anyone who self-identifies as disabled, helping them to access and navigate the Scottish social security system. The Scottish Government remains committed to ensuring the service continues to meet the needs of disabled people.

Principle 4: Encourage cross-system collaboration

Cross-system collaboration is key to developing approaches to promoting benefit take-up that are inclusive, evidence-informed, and shaped by lived experience. The Benefit Take-Up Stakeholder Reference Group continues to be a vital mechanism for gathering insight from external stakeholders, bringing together Scottish Government and Social Security Scotland officials with third sector organisations to share expertise on improving take-up among eligible people. Ahead of the next Benefit Take-Up Strategy, the group was refreshed to include more voices from people with protected characteristics and seldom-heard communities. In April 2025, members contributed valuable feedback to the development of the Seldom-Heard Groups Action Plan through a dedicated workshop. Ongoing engagement with the group will help ensure the next Benefit Take-Up Strategy is not only inclusive in design but meaningfully informed by those most affected by barriers to take-up.

A more coordinated approach to stakeholder is also helping build trust and improve service delivery. Social Security Scotland has established a Strategic Stakeholder Engagement Team to manage relationships across the agency, supported by a quarterly engagement plan that aligns business priorities with stakeholder needs. This approach has been welcomed by partners such as CEMVO, who have recognised progress in building trust and acting on feedback. Engagement with organisations like Veterans Scotland has helped ensure key messages reach communities facing additional barriers to accessing support.

Principle 5: Continuously learn and improve

We know that understandable and easy-to-navigate processes are key to promoting benefit take-up, particularly for seldom-heard groups and communities of interest who may face additional barriers to accessing support. For this reason, Social Security Scotland continues to build its understanding of user needs through targeted research and engagement, ensuring that services evolve in response to lived experience and are designed to be inclusive, accessible, and rooted in dignity, fairness, and respect. Over the past year, a series of research projects have explored the experiences of people facing communication barriers when accessing social security. This includes engagement with those who speak English as a second language, e.g. ethnic minorities, refugees, and members of the Muslim and Sikh communities to understand how they learn about entitlements, navigate applications, and experience cultural stigma. Further research focused on people with additional communication needs, including those with mental health conditions, sensory impairments, learning disabilities, neurodiversity, and cognitive impairments. These insights have informed improvements to communication channels and service delivery. Looking ahead, new research is underway to explore the experiences of people affected by homelessness, domestic abuse, rural isolation, and LGBTQ+ communities, with a focus on identifying barriers and improving access.

As we continue to deliver new benefits, we are actively identifying and addressing barriers to take-up at every stage of the client journey, drawing on lessons learned to ensure services are designed to be accessible. The launch of Pension Age Disability Payment in April 2025, which replaced Attendance Allowance, introduced enhancements such as a streamlined process for third-party representation, shaped by stakeholder feedback to support financial independence and person-centred design. Likewise, Carer Support Payment, rolled out nationally in November 2024, extends entitlement to more carers in full-time education and offers tailored signposting to wider support. Further improvements in 2025/26, driven by user research, include an enhanced online application, clearer guidance on earnings rules, and new notifications for clients approaching State Pension age. A formal evaluation will explore awareness, eligibility, and application experiences, and work will continue on delivering further improvements to support, including an extension of Young Carer Grant to 19-year-olds.