By Angela Constance, Communities, Social Security and Equalities Secretary
A NEW law to create a social security system for Scotland was passed unanimously in the Scottish Parliament just a fortnight ago – but the detailed planning has been ongoing for two years.
UK Government officials are very aware of this, as they meet regularly with Scottish Government staff to discuss the complexities involved. So I was surprised to see from their Agenda contribution earlier this week that the Secretaries of State for Scotland and the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) weren’t aware.
Delivery of the first wave of benefits is on track to start by the end of this summer, when we start paying the Carer’s Allowance Supplement – a 13 per cent increase and an overall investment of more than £30 million a year to benefit more than 70,000 carers. In 2019 we introduce the Young Carer Grant, a £300 annual payment for young adults with significant caring responsibilities who do not qualify for Carer’s Allowance.
Next year we also begin delivery of Best Start Grant for low-income parents. We will pay a one-off £600 grant for the first birth of a child and provide two further £250 payments in their early years. We don’t do caps on our future generations so we are reintroducing grants of £300 for further children.
We will also deliver the first Funeral Expense Assistance in 2019 – making it simpler for people to get financial help to pay for a funeral, and increasing eligibility so we can reach more people.
We have also established Social Security Scotland, our new agency, which will deliver benefits. Based in Dundee and Glasgow, it will have 1,900 staff when fully operational. We have started recruiting the first staff who will deliver benefits and also those who will be involved in setting up our local presence – 400 local staff across the county.
We are working with people who know best, from our 2,400-strong experience panels to the charities and third sector organisations who understand the effects of what happens when policies are implemented without insight.
This is all from a standing start from the Scotland Bill passage in 2016.
I only hope that our safe and steady transfer will not be delayed by the UK Government not matching our pace. Unfortunately we have already come across examples where the stated prioritising of the shared work needed to deliver the transfer has not been matched by our experience in practice.
In March, the DWP unilaterally decided to delay our ability to abolish the bedroom tax at source through Universal Credit by more than a year, pushing past the agreed transfer between our governments from April 2019 to “no earlier than” May 2020.
And, while both governments need to work together on complex and detailed matters – for example, data transfer being both manual and via software – I was disappointed recently by a delay to securing the reusable software code necessary for us to reduce effort and costs in developing integration with DWP systems.
Our plans for the devolution of benefits are on track as noted by Audit Scotland, which commented on the “good progress” we have made. We have been seeking assurance from the DWP that it has a parallel plan in place to match ours and to ensure it is on track with the extensive work that it needs to undertake. This transfer needs to be managed in such a way that the 1.4m people who will rely on this support get the amount they expect when they expect it, and that they are treated with dignity, fairness and respect.
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