Scottish Child Payment: interim evaluation

Footnotes

1. Scottish Government (2018) Every child, every chance: tackling child poverty delivery plan 2018-2022; Scottish Government (2022) Best start, bright futures: tackling child poverty delivery plan 2022-2026.

2. The long-term benefits of better school lunches | Microeconomic Insights

3. Scottish Fiscal Commission (2022) Scotland’s Economic and Fiscal Forecasts – May 2022

4. Scottish Government (2019) Devolved benefits: evaluating the policy impact

5. The Scottish Government had a moratorium on face-to-face research at this time due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

6. It should be noted that Scottish Child Payment opened for applications in November 2020, and launched in February 2021. As such, Scottish Child Payment respondents took part in round 2 of the Client Survey.

7. As explained in the Social security: benefit take-up strategy, lack of information (e.g. lack of awareness) is one of the key reasons for non-take-up of benefits. The other reasons are costly or complex access (e.g. complexity of application) and social barriers (e.g. stigma).

8. Redeterminations can be requested by applicants who have (a) had their application denied, but disagree with the decision, or (b) had their application authorised, but think the amount they are going to be paid is wrong.

9. The percentages in Table 2 were calculated by dividing the number of approved applications for each variable category by the total number of approved applications. For example, the percentage of approved applications for those who identified as women, as shown in Table 2 (90%), is calculated by dividing the number of approved applications for women (26,940) by the total approved applications (29,955).

10. Scottish Government (2018) Scottish Government Urban Rural Classification 2016.

11. Scottish Government (2020 Scottish Index Multiple Deprivation 2020.

12. All clients are asked to complete an Equality Monitoring and Feedback form when applying for benefits. The data collected is used to identify who is using the service and to investigate how Social Security Scotland processes work for different groups of people. However, each question has a “prefer not to say” option, meaning that clients can choose not to disclose information about themselves if they do not want to.

13. More information on the figures in Table 3 is provided at Annex A.

14. It should be noted that the Client Survey was administered to people who had received a decision on an application for benefits up to or before March 2021. As stated in the introduction to this report, early applicants were informed that they would not receive a decision until after 15 February 2021, and therefore may have expected a longer wait. As such, it is possible that applicants from April 2021 onwards would respond differently to these questions.

15. It should be noted that these results do not tell us whether staff considered likely eligibility or other factors when choosing whether to provide further advice.

16. Main carers are parents or carers who do the majority of childcare within households. However, this will not always be applicable (e.g. if childcare is distributed equally between parents), and eligibility for Scottish Child Payment is based on being responsible for a child/children.

17. The Green Book: appraisal and evaluation in central government - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

18. Scottish Government (2022) Supporting documents - Tackling child poverty delivery plan 2022-2026 - annex 4: cumulative impact assessment