Discretionary Housing Payments in Scotland: 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2023

Funding for 2022-23

The Scottish Government’s total published budget for DHPs in 2022-23 was £79.0 million. This includes two funding streams for DHPs: “Bedroom Tax Mitigation” (£68.1 million) and “Other DHPs” (£10.9 million). The Bedroom Tax is also known as the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy (RSRS). The distribution of funding has been agreed by local authority leaders (as represented by CoSLA) and the Scottish Government (Table 1 and figure below) as follows:

• to date £70.0 million of funding has been provided.
• tranche 1 funding included “Other DHPs” funding for 2022/23 (£10.9 million) and 80% of the estimated cost of “Bedroom Tax Mitigation” (£54.5 million).
• an additional £2.6 million has been made available from the Emergency Budget Review of November 2022, 80% of which (£2.1 million) has been provided to mitigate the benefit cap as fully as possible.
• an additional £2.5 million to assist with cost of living pressures has been paid direct in to local authorities’ “Other DHP” funds to use at their discretion.
• the remaining 20% of the estimated cost of “Bedroom Tax Mitigation” (£13.6 million), and the remaining 20% of the estimated cost of the ‘Benefit Cap Mitigation’, (£520,000) has been held back to reimburse local authorities for spending over and above Tranche 1.

For more information about the funding methodology, see the Background Note.

An “Other DHP” underspend of £2.4 million was carried forward from 2021/22 and redistributed to local authorities for 2022/23.

From 1 January 2023, all benefit cap spending was to be met in full via the new funding stream announced in the Emergency Budget Review. This meant that any remaining 2022-23 benefit cap funds from their ‘Other’ allocation, as of 31st December, could be spent at local authorities’ discretion on other DHP purposes.