Storm Babet financial support and Personal Independence Payment (PIP) funding: EIR release

Information requested

1. How many people have applied for Storm Babet financial support and how many received it?

2. How much money has the Scottish Government spent on offering Storm Babet support?

3. How much is the budget for Personal Independence Payments for the next five years, and all analysis and briefings held by the Scottish Government surrounding this payment, including correspondence held, from between September 1 2023 to the date of this FOI?

Response

As some of the information you have requested is ‘environmental information’ for the Purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with parts of your request under those Regulations. We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with these parts of your request under FOISA.

This exemption is subject to the ‘public interest test’. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption, because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes. This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

I have noted the relevant legislation and/or regulation that would apply to each of your questions below for your convenience.

Question 1 (EIRs)

Local authorities have received 486 applications for the household and business recovery support grants in relation to Storm Babet to date with 422 being approved in total.

Question 2 (EIRs)

The Scottish Government has provided £1,102,200 in funding to Local Authorities for the Storm Babet household and business recovery support scheme.

In addition to the above funding figure, the Ministerial taskforce agreed an additional package of support for people whose homes and businesses were flooded by Storm Babet. This included:

• £100,000 was provided to Angus Council through the Homelessness Prevention Fund to help families resettle and rebuild their lives.
• £95,000 to Angus Council towards the cost of the post-flood and optioneering reports for Brechin.

The Scottish Government also set aside a budget of £1.8 million to support farmers in repairing flood banks damaged by the extreme rainfall during October. The Agricultural Floodbank Repair Grant Scheme closed on 15 January 2024, receiving 68 applications with a grant value of £1.49m.

Further additional funding has been provided via the Bellwin Scheme. It may help if I explain that part of the financial support for those affected by Storm Babet would have been paid via the Bellwin Scheme which allows Scottish Ministers to make additional revenue support available to Local Authorities to assist with immediate and unforeseen costs in dealing with the aftermath of emergency incidents.

Activations and associated financial support via the Bellwin Scheme do not exist in isolation and it is possible that a Local Authority could experience multiple incidents in a given financial year. Subsequently, it is not possible to attribute any claim (and by extension a specific amount of financial support given) to Storm Babet specifically. However, I can confirm that £16.1 million of funding has been provided for 2023-24 Bellwin claims to date.

Question 3 (FOISA)

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.

The Scottish Fiscal Commission’s Scotland’s Economic and Fiscal Forecasts – December 2023 report, published on 19 December 2023, provides an independent forecast of social security benefits expenditure. You may wish to review Figure 5.2 on page 103 of the report which provides the latest forecast of expenditure on Personal Independence Payment to 2028-29.

It may also help if I explain that the Scottish Budget for 2024-25 was set using the Scottish Fiscal Commission’s independent forecasts for social security benefits expenditure. The 2024-25 budget of £3,226 million for Adult Disability Payment is for both Adult Disability Payment and Personal Independence Payment, of which £641 million is for Personal Independence Payment. It should be noted that years 2025-26 onwards are forecasts and the budgets for each year will be set through the Scottish Government’s annual budget-setting process.

As shown in number [1] in the footnote to Figure 5.2, Adult Disability Payment has replaced Personal Independence Payment in Scotland. Therefore, the figures shown include spending on Personal Independence Payment until all Scottish clients have been transferred to Adult Disability Payment through a case transfer process. A breakdown of the Adult Disability Payment forecast to 2028-29 from Figure 5.2 is available in supplementary table 5.4 (located on page 105).

I have also provided links to further publications and analysis below that you may find helpful:

• Cases selected for transfer to Child Disability Payment and Adult Disability Payment: management information to 31 January 2024
• Personal Independence Payment statistics to January 2024
• Scotland’s Economic and Fiscal Forecasts – December 2023 – Social Security Supplementary Figures
• Transforming Health and Disability White Paper

In regards to your request for copies of correspondence regarding Personal Independence Payments I have included copies of said information in Annex B for your convenience.

On reviewing materials within the scope of your request, exemptions have been applied in line with FOISA. The exemptions applied can be found in Annex A.

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.

EIR 202400405348 - Information Released - Annex

File type

4 page PDF

File size

150.1 kB