Minimum Income Guarantee Steering Group: June 2022 minutes and meeting papers

Minimum Income Guarantee Expert Group: commissioned research

Background

Much of the early work carried out by the workstreams has been to identify the evidence needed to form recommendations and set out options for a MIG. The outcomes of the resulting research and commissioning will be used in the short term to contribute to the interim report, and in the longer term to inform the design of a MIG itself. Each of the workstreams has commissioned at least one piece of research, most have commissioned multiple pieces.

Current progress

The public opinion workstream will collate and coordinate all research asks to ensure that there is no duplicate work being done by the workstreams.The level and equalities workstreams have two completed items that were carried out as library searches by the Scottish Government and the results synthesised by the secretariat before being presented to the workstreams.

Scottish Government researchers have reviewed all requests made so far. A senior analyst is co-ordinating all requests and ensuring that they are assigned to an appropriate researcher or analyst. She has confirmed that Scottish Government colleagues have capacity to take on all the questions raised so far.

Questions being led on by Scottish Government will be assigned to various social researchers and analysts, dependent on the nature and leading policy area of the question asked. The secretariat will engage with the assigned researchers on behalf of the workstreams, for example to confirm the focus of the specific research ask, and to establish the estimated completion date for each piece of work.

Research aims and timing

The aim is to have all research currently agreed upon completed in time to feed into the first draft of the interim report. The secretariat have made Scottish Governments analysts aware of the timetable for producing the interim report, and analysts have indicated that they do have capacity to complete the commissions within this timescale, but do not yet have a detailed timetable for completing each piece of work. As pieces of work are assigned to specific analysts the secretariat will engage with them to identify a completion date.