Information in relation to Adult Disability Payment applications awarded in the past 24 months: FOI release

FOI Reference: FOI/202600523717
Date received: 24 June 2026
Date responded: 22 July 2026

Information requested

Request for information 1:  

How many new adult disability payments have been approved in the last 24 months, with a breakdown per month. 

Request for information 2:   

If not too much money, what the disability is? 

Response

Request for information 1:  

The number of new Adult Disability Payment applications that have been approved is available from our regularly published Adult Disability Payment statistics, with the most recent publication covering up to 30 April 2026. Monthly figures of the applications approved can be found in Column G of Table 1. Our next publication, covering up to 31 July 2026, will be released on 15 September 2026. 

Under section 25(1) of FOISA, we do not have to give you information which is already reasonably accessible to you. If, however, you do not have internet access to obtain this information from the website(s) listed, then please contact me again and I will send you a paper copy.  

Request for information 2: 

We publish details of all time Adult Disability Payment application numbers and initial decisions by disability condition on Table 5 of our published Adult Disability Payment statistics. It may be helpful to know that disability condition data is based on the primary disability condition recorded in application data extracts. This condition is selected by a Case Manager during the application process using the supporting information provided by the applicant. 

Applicants may have more than one health condition. However, Social Security Scotland can only report on conditions recorded as primary or secondary in its case management system. People may have additional conditions that are not recorded in these categories. 

Because of this, it is not possible to say that an award was made solely because of any individual condition shown in the data. While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing some of the information requested would exceed the upper cost limit of £600.  

We are unable to provide monthly disability condition figures in line with our latest publication which would cover the last 24 months, without specialist staff members designing specific coding to undertake the required complex analysis, something which we are not required to do under FOISA. Therefore, the only means of obtaining the requested information would be to manually check over 80,000 authorised Adult Disability Payment cases held in our client records application. 

Under section 12 of FOISA public authorities are not required to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying would exceed the upper cost limit, which is currently set at £600 by Regulations made under section 12. 

Unfortunately, due to the large number of cases that would require manual checking, it is difficult to advise how you might be able to narrow the scope of your request to bring it within the cost limit of £600.  

You may also find it helpful to look at the Scottish Information Commissioner's 'Tips for requesting information under FOI and the EIRs' on his website at: https://www.foi.scot/how-do-i-ask. 

We do however have figures of disability conditions covering a 24-month period up to the end of January 2026 only. We have this information available because of a previous separate piece of analysis that was undertaken and to recreate it for the present 24-month period would be cost exempt. Please see the attached document. 

An exemption under section 38(1)(b) of FOISA (personal information) applies to a small amount of the information because it is personal data of a third party, i.e. given the low numbers of applicants, we are satisfied that there is a realistic prospect that releasing the information risks releasing personal information, and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and in section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018.  

This exemption is not subject to the ‘public interest test’, so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. 

About FOI

Social Security Scotland is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. The Scottish Government also publishes responses to requests.