Carer Support Payment amendment regulations: impact assessment considerations - policy note

Background

The principal Carer Support Payment regulations set out the rules and eligibility criteria for the benefit, which is replacing Carer’s Allowance in Scotland. The benefit is a form of assistance to provide support to people providing regular and substantial care to someone who receives a qualifying disability benefit.

A suite of impact assessments were prepared alongside the development of Carer Support Payment policy and laid with the principal Carer Support Payment regulations which came into force on 19 November 2023. The impact assessments concluded that Carer Support Payment would have a broadly positive impact on a range of equalities groups, island communities, and to improving the realisation of children’s rights and wellbeing.

These original impact assessments included:

• Equalities Impact Assessment (EQIA)
• Child Rights and Wellbeing Impact Assessment (CRWIA)
• Business and Regulatory Impact Assessment (BRIA)
• Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA)
• Fairer Scotland Duty Assessment (FSDA)
• Islands Communities Impact Assessment (ICIA).

Carer Support Payment launched on 20 November 2023 in the pilot areas of Dundee City, Perth and Kinross and Na h-Eileanan Siar (the Western Isles). The Carer Support Payment amendment regulations will provide for a phased rollout approach to follow. This will gradually expand Carer Support Payment to the remaining local authority areas across Scotland, with the benefit becoming available nationally by autumn 2024. This is broken down as follows:

* The pilot launched on 20 November 2023 but the regulations came into force on 19 November 2023 to allow eligible carers to receive payments for the first full award week, which runs Sunday-Saturday.

** The local authority areas that the benefit will be expanded to as part of the national roll out are: Argyll and Bute, Clackmannanshire, Dumfries and Galloway, East Dunbartonshire, East Lothian, East Renfrewshire, City of Edinburgh, Falkirk, Glasgow City, Highlands, Inverclyde, Midlothian, Orkney Islands, Renfrewshire, Scottish Borders, Shetland Islands, Stirling, West Dunbartonshire and West Lothian.

The principal Carer Support Payment regulations also included provision to extend entitlement to a further group of students with exceptional circumstances within regulation 13(2). This group of students aged 16-19 may be eligible for certain reserved benefits such as Universal Credit in their own right. Universal Credit is normally only available to people aged 18 and over, but this group are able to receive support due to particular circumstances. This will include being without parental support, being responsible for a child or qualifying young person, being assessed as having a limited capability to work, or being part of a couple where one or both are students.

The amendment regulations will bring forward the commencement date of these provisions in the principal Carer Support Payment regulations. This will extend entitlement to this group of students with exceptional circumstances, from 01 October 2024 to 23 June 2024. This will enable these students to benefit from this change sooner, once the benefit is available in their area.

As the amendment regulations will expand eligibility to a further group of students from June 2024, they will also include additional backdating provisions for this group.

Special backdating provisions will also be introduced to provide that certain individuals can have their entitlement backdated to the date when Carer Support Payment first became available. This includes individuals who:

• are in full-time advanced education and aged 16 to 19, or full-time education at any level and are over the age of 20;
• did not satisfy the Carer’s Allowance past presence test (2 out of 3 years) but do satisfy the Carer Support Payment past presence test (26 out of 52 weeks); or
• benefit from certain exemptions to the past presence test which are not available under Carer’s Allowance.

These special backdating rules are intended to ensure that clients living outside the initial pilot areas will not be disadvantaged in terms of their entitlement to support compared with those living in the pilot areas. The special backdating provisions are limited to these specific groups because they would not have been eligible for Carer’s Allowance during the pilot period and therefore would have been unable to access any carer benefits during that time. Other carers living outside of the initial pilot areas would have been able to apply for Carer’s Allowance and have their benefits transferred later to Carer Support Payment as part of the case transfer process.

We considered whether the range of impact assessments produced for the principal Carer Support Payment regulations should be updated and republished alongside laying the amendment regulations. It was considered that, as the amendment regulations mainly extend the areas in which Carer Support Payment is available, and policy is unchanged from the principal regulations, that this would not be required.

The full range of impact assessments carried out alongside the development of Carer Support Payment are live documents. We continue to work to improve the data and information we have on carers and others who may be affected by Carer Support Payment policy and services. We will continue to use this method to consider how we may improve our service. This includes direct research such as that undertaken by our Experience Panels and consideration of stakeholder and other research which will include Client Surveys in future. We continue to hold annual equalities sessions with our Carer Benefits Advisory Group as part of our work to address the gaps in data and understanding identified by our impact assessments.

At the same time, we are also working on finalising our evaluation plans for both Carer Support Payment new claims and case transfer from Carer’s Allowance. These will bring together a range of data, including bespoke research, to help us to consider the impacts of Carer Support Payment.

We are also continuing to work on considering and developing future improvements to Carer Support Payment as set out in our impact assessments. We are continuing to utilise and develop our impact assessments alongside this work. We plan to publish a full set of updated impact assessments as part of this work which would include further regulations to provide for the changes.

This note therefore provides further information on our considerations of the potential impacts of the roll out approach for the benefit. In particular, this piece of work will consider whether any groups of carers will be disadvantaged as a result of the amendment regulations. This could be due to either living within an area where the benefit is rolled out later, or by being part of a specific demographic.