Universal Credit Scottish choices: evaluation - qualitative research - annex b

Footnotes

1. Income Support, Income-based Jobseeker's Allowance, Income-related Employment and Support Allowance, Working Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit and Housing Benefit.

2. Personal circumstances are assessed to work out the amount of Universal Credit households will get each month. Earnings are passed to the Universal Credit system by HMRC's Real Time Information System, so payments should take account of fluctuations in earnings.

3. See Welcome to Stat-Xplore

4. This was the most recent month for which figures were available at the time of writing. In March there were 264,117 people on Universal Credit in Scotland - so this represents an increase of over 200,000 in the months following the national lockdown to control the COVID-19 pandemic in late March 2020.

5. For example, see SPICe (2017) SPICe Briefing: The Introduction of Universal Credit and ARCH (2016) Universal Credit - One Year On, National Federation of ALMOs

6. Scottish Government (2020) Universal Credit Scottish choices - management information to end March 2020

7. See Appendix A for the questionnaire used in screening/recruitment. This included a requirement that they had been on Universal Credit for at least three months. This was specified both to ensure that people had been on it long enough to have been offered/experienced Scottish choices, and so that the sample was not dominated by people who had newly signed up for the benefit since the COVID-19 crisis in March.

8. Figures derived from Scottish Government (2020) Universal Credit Scottish choices - management information to end March 2020

9. This reflects the fact that the local authority in question emailed the link around all the landlords in its register. Most other local authorities said they were not able to do this for research purposes. Note that the 132 includes some landlords with properties in other local authorities too, since landlords could code multiple local authorities where they held properties.

10. Using Excel, with each column representing a theme and each row an individual interview, so that the data can be sorted in different ways for further analysis.

11. These cases were not, however, counted towards the number of participants on Direct Payments to Landlords in Table 1.1, above. Only cases where the interviewers were confident after probing that they had been on Scottish choices were counted towards quotas.

12. As noted in Chapter 1, Scottish choices are only offered through the Journal at the start of the second assessment period, after the person's first monthly Universal Credit payment has been determined.