Scottish Welfare Fund: FOI release

Information requested

Details of the number of applications for the Scottish Welfare Fund, the number of successful claimants, the number who unsuccessfully claimed and the average money a successful claim received, broken down by month, from 1 March 2020 to the present.

Response

Some of the information you have requested is available from our monthly management information publication at: https://www.gov.scot/publications/swf-monthly-management-information/. This includes monthly applications and expenditure data for March and April 2020. Under section 25(1) of FOISA, we do not have to give you information which is already reasonably accessible to you. If, however, you do not have internet access to obtain this information from the website(s) listed, then please contact me again and I will send you a paper copy.

Unpublished management information shows that local authorities awarded 18,822 crisis grants and 2,939 community care grants to successful claimants in March. In April, 25,768 crisis grants and 2,592 community care grants were awarded. Please note that these are initial management information only, the information comes from a different source to the Official Statistics and has not been quality assured to the same standard. Official Statistics covering March will be published on 28 July 2020, and Official Statistics for April will be published in October, as pre-announced here: 
https://www.gov.scot/publications/official-statistics-forthcoming-publications/. 

The Scottish Government does not hold management information on unsuccessful claimants from March 2020 onwards. While we do hold management information on number of applications received and awards made, we do not hold information on number of applications processed, which would be required to derive number of unsuccessful claims. In addition, we did not hold any management information covering May or June 2020 at the time of the request. This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have requested.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.