Universal Credit Scottish Choices – management information to March 2026

Quality assurance

This management information provides data on the acceptance rates of the UC Scottish choices. The DWP carry out a range of quality assurance checks on the monthly data before sending it to Scottish Government. These include:

• Comparisons with the previous month’s figures.
• Check values are consistent across full range of tables.
• Sense check trends in data over time.
• Independent checking of the code to run the tables, and subsequent outputs.

All figures in this report have been rounded to the nearest 10.

Methodological improvements

The long pause in releasing new statistics on Scottish Choices was due to a complete overhaul of the methodology behind the production of these figures by the DWP. This means that earlier figures published in this series are not comparable to this release, and have been completely superseded. The intention is to continue to publish updates to these statistics annually.

Local authority level breakdown

Local authority figures are supplied as a snapshot of the latest available month’s figures, so trend data is not available on this basis.

Comparison to DWP statistics

Universal Credit Scottish Choices data differs from DWP’s official statistics on people and households in the following ways:

• UC Scottish choices are offered to a household from the start of the second assessment period, so will not be captured in the management information until at least one month after DWP’s people and household payment statistics.
• DWP statistics include people that are on UC (completed the UC claim process, accepted their Client Commitment and have not had a termination recorded) and households in payment of UC that have an assessment period on the ‘count date’ (second Thursday in each month).
• In comparison, UC Scottish choices data show the number of households that were offered and implemented a choice as at the end of each month and include those that may have left UC/UC Scottish choices within the given month.

Further development

Additional breakdowns of the data may be developed in the future to highlight interesting and useful trends, and to aid policy development.