Scottish Child Payment: updated position paper - October 2019

Next Steps

Delivering a new benefit on the scale of the Scottish Child Payment presents significant opportunities to support families, and tackle child poverty, but also brings with it challenges.

Since the initial announcement on the Scottish Child Payment in June, a significant amount of work has been undertaken to further refine our thinking on delivery requirements and implications, and develop draft regulations. We will continue to work at pace to deliver it.

Our next steps are to submit draft regulations to the Scottish Commission on Social Security for scrutiny, to ensure we can lay regulations in the Scottish Parliament. In parallel, and following the completion of the 'Discovery' phase, work has started on the 'Alpha' phase of service design, during which we will continue to engage with citizens on user research, design the client journey for the new benefit and prototype our application forms and test the draft application process within our case management system.

Social Security Scotland will continue recruitment drives to ensure readiness for delivery of the Scottish Child Payment: recent recruitment workshops had over 1000 attendees, resulting in the 100 Operations posts currently being advertised receiving over 1700 applications. Initial work has also started with the agency's Property Division to explore the feasibility of options for suitable classroom space for training and onboarding the large volumes of new staff expected to be required.

We will be highly dependent on the co-operation of the UK Government to ensure we can start making payments next year, and we will continue to work closely with them, particularly on the necessary data sharing and legislative requirements.

Throughout all of this we will continue to engage closely with stakeholders, and undertake further user testing and research, to ensure the voices of those who will benefit from the Scottish Child Payment are at the heart of its development. This will include specific and detailed work with seldom heard groups, and those with protected characteristics, such as women's groups, young parents and black, minority and ethnic communities.