Scottish Child Payment: updated position paper - January 2020

Next Steps

We will continue to work at pace to deliver the Scottish Child Payment, making further progress with developing and testing the systems we need to implement the new payment as part of our Agile service design, and undertaking the work required to deliver the necessary improvements to Social Security Scotland's six priority supporting service areas. In parallel Social Security Scotland will continue to recruit the additional staff needed to deliver the Scottish Child Payment.

As we have made clear in previous position papers, we continue to depend on the co-operation of the UK Government to ensure we can start making payments this year and that we can extend the Scottish Child Payment to all eligible families with children under 16 in 2022. We continue to work closely with DWP and HMRC in particular, focusing especially on the necessary data sharing and legislative requirements to allow us to introduce the new benefit to time.

We are continuing to work with SCoSS to support their scrutiny process and will consider their recommendations as we work to finalise the draft regulations for the payment. We will continue our engagement with stakeholders to utilise their experience and expertise as we consider strategies to promote take-up of the benefit, with a particular focus on seldom heard groups. This work will be captured in the suite of impact assessments which will accompany the draft regulations when they are laid in Parliament.