The data in this publication is sourced from Social Security Scotland’s case management system. The system holds information on all applications received, decisions and payments.

Data about the applicant, their partner, and their children is collected through the online application form or is entered by client advisors during telephone applications or processing of paper applications.

Information about the application outcome and payments is created in the case management system as an application is processed.

The information is held across multiple tables within the system. 100% extracts of administrative data are taken from this system every day for internal reporting purposes.

Data cuts

Data cuts combine information from the different tables in the system into one daily extract which includes details of all Scottish Child Payment applications made since 9 November 2020.

An additional child extract containing details about children listed in the application forms is also available for reporting purposes.

A payments extract which contains information on the financial aspects of applications is used for calculations in this publication.

Minimising the information

When Social Security Scotland extended the eligibility to children under 16, a decision was taken when designing the application process to minimise the information that clients presently receiving Scottish Child Payment for children under 6 had to provide in order to add older children to their existing case.

As a consequence, the case manage management system does not generate a full application case in this instance.

Instead, any incoming requests to add children to existing cases generate a ‘task’ within the case management system.

As the data source which underpins the application numbers in this publication contains information for each application case, this publication reports on full applications received only.

Whilst the case management system was being monitored in the period immediately after the benefit eligibility was extended, information was temporarily manually recorded on the number of tasks generated.

The temporary availability of this information meant the management information releases published on 16 November 2022 and 20 December 2022 included both full applications and applications from existing clients requesting to add children over six to the existing Scottish Child Payment awards.

There was no provision to continually manually record this information beyond the post-extension monitoring period, meaning the last available date there was information total number of requests to add children to existing cases was 11 December 2022.

As a result, a decision was made to continue to report on full applications only within this publication.

Management information release

The management information release on 20 December 2022 indicated that approximately 123,000 applications in total had been received between 14 November and 11 December 2022. Of these approximately 85,500 (70%) were full applications and are reported on within this publication.

The remaining 37,500 (30%) were requests from existing Scottish Child Payment clients looking to add children to their existing payment cases. These requests are not included in any application counts reported in this release.

Whilst these requests are not reflected in the application counts, the clients and the payments they have received are reflected in the wider payments and caseload information presented.

To take into account backdating and delays between applications being authorised and payments being made, a data cut from 1 November 2022 has been used to produce statistics on applications received and decisions made up to 11.59 pm on 31 March 2023.

Later data cuts may include retrospective changes to application details, including corrections to details in the case management system, and changes that have resulted from re-determinations and appeals.

Showing re-determinations and appeals

When a re-determination or appeal is requested, the data in this publication will show the decision date, outcome, payment date and payment value after a re‑determination or appeal has been decided.

Where a re-determination or appeal has been requested but not decided, decision date, outcome, payment date and payment value will be updated to reflect information about the re‑determination or appeal, rather than the original application.

Until March 2022, re-determinations and appeals were reported based on management information manually collected by the Client Experience team at Social Security Scotland.

From April 2022 onwards, the figures reported in Table 9 for re-determinations are based on data extracted from the case management system.

This is part of an ongoing piece of work to improve the reporting of re-determinations and appeals across all benefits. As such the data source and resulting outputs are currently being reviewed and figures from April 2022 onwards may be subject to change. Information on appeals are currently still manually collected.

Within our statistical reporting, key dates are used to assign applications received, applications processed and payments issued to time periods. This is a different methodology to that used in financial reporting and, as a result, there may be differences in the values reported for a given time period.