Number of clients who have received at least one Scottish Child Payment by the financial year of the payment issued date

The number of clients to have benefitted from at least one Scottish Child Payment issued is calculated by summing up the number of unique individual clients who have received at least one Scottish Child Payment issued during each financial year.

This is distinct from the ‘number of clients who have received at least one Scottish Child Payment’ presented in Table 8 because with a recurring payment, over time there will be flows in both directions regarding the number of clients in receipt of Scottish Child Payment at a given point in time.

For example, previously paid clients whose children are no longer eligible in a subsequent financial year will no longer be counted for that specific time period.

Number of children who have received at least one Scottish Child Payment

Following a review of the underlying data and methods used to calculate this statistic, a decision was taken to remove it from the publication tables from November 2021 onwards.

Development work is ongoing to obtain an alternative data source to enable the reporting of this to be reintroduced to this publication.

Number of children in receipt of Scottish Child Payment (caseload)

By definition the two measures described above are cumulative figures, meaning they will continue to increase as new clients and children receive Scottish Child Payment for the first time but they do not provide any information about how many of those clients or children remain eligible to receive the benefit.

In order to more accurately reflect the active caseload for Scottish Child Payment, it is important to take into account the flows in both directions, i.e. include any new children who are receiving the benefit, and exclude children who are no longer eligible.

Clients can add additional children to an existing claim without needing to submit a new application form, by using the online Change of Circumstance portal.

Furthermore, it is possible for new Scottish Child Payment applications to be approved which do not lead in an additional client payment if for example, the client is already in receipt of the benefit and has applied for Best Start Grant via the joint application form which allows clients to apply for both benefits at once.

This means there are limitations to using only application levels to estimate the number of children in receipt of Scottish Child Payment.

An estimate of caseload, or number of children receipt of Scottish Child Payment, has been reported in this publication since August 2021 using a consistent methodology.

For the caseload estimate as at 31 December 2022, a change was made to this methodology.

The estimate was derived by calculating the total value of payments made in the final 28-day interval of the current reporting period, and dividing by the value paid to cover a four-week period for one child – currently this would be £100.

A 28-day period is chosen because payments are made to clients every four weeks from the day they receive their first Scottish Child Payment. This choice ensures that the total value of payments does not include more than one payment being made to any given client.

Limitations

This measure provides users with a greater understanding of how many children are actively benefiting from Scottish Child Payment.

There are however a few limitations with the chosen methodology:

• a true point-in-time measure of the number of children in receipt of Scottish Child Payment on the final day of the publication reporting period may differ to the derived figure presented in this publication
• for example, it is possible that some of the children paid in the last 28 days are no longer eligible on the final day of the reporting period
• likewise, it is possible that some children may had recently been approved for the benefit but had not yet received their first payment by the end of the reporting period
  
• by dividing by £100, it is assumed that all children being paid are eligible for the entire cover period of their latest payment, however it is possible that a child was due to turn six within the payment cover period and was therefore paid less than the full £100
• equally, new clients receive a one off payment in arrears if their case is not approved with the first week ensuring the receive payment from the date their application was made, which can be greater than £100

Extension of eligibility

Due to the extension of the Scottish Child Payment eligibility, a notable number of new clients were being paid for the first time in the 28 day period used to estimate caseload as at 31 December 2022.

This resulted in a significant number of payments for £25 (one week), £50 (two weeks) and £75 (three weeks) – the first payment to these clients settling into a regular four weekly cycle.

This added strain to the assumption made until now that non-standard payments both more and less than £100 per child broadly cancelled each other out.

To account for this, rather than divide through the total value of payments issued by £100, a change was made to the methodology to instead divide the value paid to each client by £25 multiplied by the length of the cover period for that payment.

This ensured that, for example, where a client was paid £100 for a two week cover period this was correctly counted as two children, and not assumed to be a four week cover period for one child.

As the figure remains a derived estimate, a decision has been made to round the number of children in receipt of Scottish Child Payment to the nearest thousand.