Information request and response under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002
FOI Reference: FOI/202300384084
Date received: 7 November 2023
Date responded: 6 December 2023
Information requested
You asked for the following information in relation to Adult Disability Payment change of circumstances review, and IT issues preventing Adult Disability Payment claims from being processed.
Request for information 1: How many people's claims are currently being held up by Social Security Scotland IT issues.
Request for information 2: How many people have waited six months or more for a decision.
Request for information 3: How long, on average, it takes for your IT team to fix critical bugs.
Request for information 4: Where IT issues have been resolved for other clients, how were they resolved and will this resolution be offered to clients in the same circumstances and at what timescale.
Response
Request for information 1:
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance Social Security Scotland does not have some of the information you have requested. Our current defect management system is not formatted in a manner which allows us to extract the total volume of client’s applications or change of circumstances that are being impacted by an open defect. The information in this system only covers cases where an issue was raised. Where there is a clear issue which requires a resolution, colleagues are not requested to continue reporting the issue, and therefore not all affected cases would be captured.
Request for information 2:
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance Social Security Scotland does not have some of the information you have requested. Social Security Scotland does not currently track the dates that change of circumstance review decisions are made, so we are unable to provide data for how many people have been waiting 6 months or more. There is work ongoing to ensure this data is available in the future.
Request for information 3:
We have interpreted critical bugs to mean Priority 1 defects. Priority 1 refers to major system outages.
The time taken for critical/Priority 1 defects to be resolved depends on the size, scale, and complexity of the defect.
Social Security Scotland aim to either resolve or put in place alternative process arrangements for all critical/Priority 1 defects within 4 hours to minimise any impact on our clients.
Request for information 4:
We have interpreted your question to relate to how we will typically resolve and / or manage a defect. This will either be through a system code fix or by introducing a temporary manual process that allows client records to be processed.
Social Security Scotland will work through similarly affected cases in a chronological order until they are cleared.
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.