Student debt interest allocation: FOI response

FOI reference: FOI/17/02613
Date received: 31 October 2017
Date responded: 24 November 2017

Information requested

You asked for:

"The use of student debt interests by the Scottish Government and whether it is invested in a specific budget."

Response

In answer to your question, the interest from student loan debt is capitalised and is therefore added to the outstanding student loan balance. Any loan repayments that are made therefore count against the overall loan balance.

With regards to the allocation to a specific budget, the loan interest receivable, loan advances, interest capitalised and loan repayments are all Annually Managed Expenditure (AME) budgets allocated by HM Treasury. These can't be used by the Scottish Government as funding it can allocate to other priorities as part of the budget setting process.

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