Justifying your review period or indefinite award decision (and asking individuals to give specific updates at their next review)

When you choose to set a review period or an indefinite award, you must set out a justification for your decision within the individual’s determination letter.

You should justify the length of the review period or why an indefinite award is appropriate with reference to any and all relevant facts that you have taken into consideration.

If you are setting a review period, you should consider whether there are any specific updates Social Security Scotland might need from the individual at their next review to make a robust determination. Where you have identified specific updates that will be needed, you should set these out to the individual within the review period justification. This will:

• support the individual to engage with their scheduled review as they will understand why the review date was selected, and what further information they will need to give us to aid decision making at their next review
• ensure the next case manager understands the reason for your review period decision, and has relevant information from the individual when they return their review form to support with making the review determination.

You could ask the individual to provide:

• An update about their needs under specific Daily Living or Mobility Component activities. For example, information in their application, review form or supporting information might indicate that a change is likely relating to their current level of need under a specific activity or component by the time their next review takes place.
• New supporting information, only where it will clearly be needed for the next case manager to more fully understand the individual’s level of needs as existing supporting information will be out of date and not of the same value at the time the client's next review date is set for. See ‘The period of time the information relates to’ in the Understanding and interpreting supporting information chapter for more information.

This is not an exhaustive list. There may be other specific updates that are relevant in individual scenarios that you could set out to the individual. This should always be approached from a position of:

• supporting the individual to engage with their scheduled review
• ensuring the next case manager is more likely to have the information they need from the individual to make a robust review decision.

In some circumstances, asking the individual to provide specific updates on their needs or circumstances may not be relevant or appropriate. For example, if you are choosing a longer review period, you might be less likely to identify any changes that could occur before the individual’s next review, as their needs might be highly unlikely to change.

It will be for the next case manager to decide whether the information provided from the individual with their review form is sufficient to make the scheduled review decision, or whether decision making tools should be used to support with making the determination.