Scottish Carer's Assistance: consultation

Executive Summary

Scottish Carer's Assistance will replace Carer's Allowance in Scotland. When we introduce Scottish Carer's Assistance:

• We will improve how support is provided to carers, and make links to wider services. This will include working with carers to design systems that work for them, processes that treat people fairly, with dignity and respect, and making links from Social Security Scotland into wider carer support. Social Security Scotland's Local Delivery service will also help carers with face to face support, including assistance with benefit applications. This will help carers access all the support available to them, be it financial support or more widely, and help ensure carers have a positive experience of social security.
• We will continue to provide extra money to Scottish carers. To better recognise the different impacts of different caring situations, we plan to introduce a new extra payment of £10 a week for people who will get Scottish Carer's Assistance who are caring for more than one person who is getting a disability benefit. We also intend to pay Scottish Carer's Assistance to carers when the person they care for is in the process of challenging a disability benefit decision, and receiving short-term assistance – where no support is currently available. This will help provide more financial stability for carers. The extra money from the Carer's Allowance Supplement and our Young Carer Grant will continue.
• We will extend support further after launch, starting with five proposed priority actions. To protect carers' existing support and ensure everyone can benefit from these changes at the same time, we will bring forward these changes once we have safely and securely transferred carers' benefits from Carer's Allowance to Scottish Carer's Assistance. Our five priority actions are:
  • removing education restrictions so full-time students can get Scottish Carer's Assistance,
  • allowing carers to add together hours spent caring for more than one person to meet the caring hours requirement for Scottish Carer's Assistance,
  • increasing the time carers will receive Scottish Carer's Assistance from eight to twelve weeks after the death of a cared for person,
  • making payments for longer when a cared for person goes into hospital or residential care, and
  • increasing the amount carers can earn and still get support.

These changes would help carers access opportunities outside of caring where they wish to do so, provide more financial stability, and better recognise different caring situations than the current benefit. We will also seek your views on whether we should consider new support for those with long term caring roles.

Launching Scottish Carer's Assistance will be our highest priority following the delivery of Adult Disability Payment in August this year, the extension of Scottish Child Payment for 6 to 16 year olds by the end of this year (subject to the Department for Work and Pensions providing the necessary data), and our low income winter heating benefit in winter 2022/23. As part of our joint programme of work to devolve social security, we are working with the Department for Work and Pensions to see how quickly we can deliver Scottish Carer's Assistance. We expect it will take at least 18 months to build because Carer's Allowance is the most complex benefit we will replace in terms of its links with other benefits, including those delivered by the Department for Work and Pensions. We hope to have an agreement on timings soon.

The purpose of this consultation is to gather views on these changes from unpaid carers, the people they care for, support organisations and the wider public.

Feedback from the consultation will help shape the changes we make and how we make them. This consultation also provides information on the wider support available to carers and talks about our ongoing work to implement the recommendations from the Independent Review of Adult Social Care, including the introduction of a National Care Service which we consulted on last year. The findings from this wider work and these consultations will be taken forward in our Carers Strategy, that will set out how we will work across government and public services to support unpaid carers as we recover from the pandemic.

In developing the proposals in this consultation, we have looked at how the decisions we make could affect different people and groups differently – using research and evidence we already have and listening to carers and organisations who support them to find out more. At the end of this consultation paper we ask for your thoughts on what more we can do through Scottish Carer's Assistance to improve equality and deliver better outcomes for all unpaid carers.