Chamber and committees

Thank you. Just to check, you do not think that there will be an increase in child winter heating assistance applicants.

I would like to take some of those questions a bit further, as some of the questions that I had intended to ask have already been answered. What further data do you think that you need from Social Security Scotland? You mentioned that data that you get from the DWP allows you to make further assumptions about the impact or where the spikes are coming from. Do you expect that Social Security Scotland will gather similar data? Have you asked for that? As you know, we will hear from Social Security Scotland shortly, so we have a timely opportunity to indicate if there are any areas that you think that it might need to consider.

I have no further questions. Jeremy Balfour’s last question, which has just been answered, is the one that I was going to ask.

That is helpful to understand—thank you. My final question on this is about the fact that 200,000 applications for the Scottish child payment were expected when the increase came in but, in the event, there were only 89,000. What happened to the other people? What information do you have about those missing people? How much of it is to do with the fact that the website either was undergoing some development or crashed? Have you looked into that?

Did you do any work initially with the DWP to look at the data that it gathers to give intelligence not just for its operations but for the future of forecasting? How much of that did you consider replicating? If you did not replicate it, why did you make those choices?

Do you expect to get the data? Is it gathered?

The reason why I asked that question is that that felt a little inconsistent with some of the information in the previous conversation about the increases in disability payments and why that would not be seen to be driven through the child winter heating assistance. From our cost of living conversation, it would appear that more people might become eligible for some of the winter heating payments as a result of that situation. However, you are working on the assumption that that will not be the case.

That is helpful. Thank you. Those are all the questions that I had on that theme.

Do you know when those systems will have the information that you need to collect built into them?

I understand that. I can see that, because of the choices that have been made so far. I get that there are countless problems with the DWP and the way in which it does things, not least policy. Can you explain why it was decided not to just lift the technology that the DWP used and apply it to the policy and the specifics for Scotland, instead of completely starting from scratch and facing the situation that you have just described, which is having to shut down the system for the weekend to try to catch up, inevitably continuing to have to bolt on additional bits to IT and having what appears to be a substandard system?