Information request and response under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002
FOI Reference: FOI/202300352364
Date received: 18 April 2023
Date responded: 18 May 2023
Request
Request for information 1:
The average waiting time/duration for a person to be approved for a benefit after applying for it from Social Security Scotland per year in the last five financial years (2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23).
In other words, I am asking for the average waiting time/duration per year.
I am also asking this about each individual benefit that Social Security Scotland provides.
Request for information 2:
The longest recorded waiting time/duration for a person to be approved for a benefit after applying for it from Social Security Scotland per year in the last five financial years (2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23).
In other words, I am asking for the longest recorded wait that an individual has experienced in each financial year.
I am also asking this about each individual benefit that Social Security Scotland provides.
Request for information 3:
If possible, please provide Social Security Scotland’s targeted time of processing and approving an application for each benefit.
In other words, the amount of time Social Security Scotland ideally wants to deliver the benefit to someone once an application for it has been made.
Response to your request
We routinely publish information relating to processing times for benefit applications as part of our Official Statistics publications. These are available at our statistics publications page here:
Request for information 1:
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance Social Security Scotland does not have the information requested.
Our systems and processes record the time taken to a decision, rather than only approvals, and as such we do not hold the analysis you have requested.
In order to be of assistance to you, we considered whether it would be beneficial to interpret your request as relating to the time taken to reach a decision on each application (the processing time), and we have provided this information on an attached document.
Please note the data in the attached spreadsheet and data in our regular statistics publications cover different time periods. While this request has asked for data by financial year, we regularly provide this data by month. This accounts for the differing figures provided.
Request for information 2:
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance Social Security Scotland does not have the information requested.
Our systems and processes record the time taken to a decision, rather than only approvals, and as such we do not hold the analysis you have requested.
In order to be of assistance to you, we considered whether it would be beneficial to interpret your request as relating to the time taken to reach a decision on each application (the processing time), however a partially automated analysis of cases was unable to differentiate out cases where applicants failed to complete the application process. The only way for us then to service this request would be to conduct a manual analysis of potentially thousands of files, and this would be likely to exceed the upper cost limit.
Request for information 3:
Social Security Scotland’s commitment in Our Charter is to handle clients’ applications and enquiries as quickly as we can. For Funeral Support Payment our aim is to process completed applications within ten working days of receiving all supporting evidence for an application. A link to Our Charter is below:
https://www.socialsecurity.gov.scot/reporting/publications/our-charter
About FOI
Social Security Scotland is committed to publishing responses to requests. The Scottish Government also publishes responses to requests. You can view the responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.
Processing times - FOI 202300352364