Chamber and committees

Communication with social tenants about their rent or housing benefit is the responsibility of local authorities and housing associations.

The Scottish Welfare Fund comprises of Community Care Grants and Crisis Grants.

The number of applications that were accepted and rejected by gender was previously answered in S4W-20605 on 2 May 2014. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx.

The following tables show the number of applications which were accepted and rejected by gender of the main applicant and by local authority. Tables are provided separately for Community Care Grants and Crisis Grants.

Table 1: Community Care Grant Decisions by Gender of Main Applicant and Local Authority.

Note: All figures have been rounded to the nearest five applications.

Table 2: Crisis Grant Decisions by Gender of Main Applicant and Local Authority.

Note: All figures have been rounded to the nearest five applications.

Further statistics on the Scottish Welfare Fund can be found at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Social-Welfare/swf.

The Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Scotland wrote to the Deputy First Minister on 2 May 2014 to offer to provide Scottish Ministers with a power to set the statutory cap on discretionary housing payments in Scotland using section 63 of the Scotland Act 1998. The Scottish Government has accepted this offer. At their meeting on 8 May 2014, the Deputy First Minister and the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Scotland agreed to prioritise the progress of the section 63 order. The order will need to be agreed by both the Scottish and UK Governments before it is laid before both Houses of the Westminster Parliament and the Scottish Parliament. It will then go before the Privy Council. The Deputy First Minister will update the Scottish Parliament once a timescale has been agreed with the Scotland Office.

(i) The UK Government provided £23.8 million for 2013-14 and 2014-15 to the Scottish Government for the Scottish Welfare Fund (SWF).

Scottish Ministers decided to use the full allocation from the UK Government to provide local welfare assistance and provided an additional £9.2 million of funding for both of these years. The total funding available for the SWF in each of these years is £33 million.

The UK Government also transferred funding for administration costs of just over
£5 million in 2013-14, falling to just over £4.6 million in 2014-15, while the Scottish Government has again provided additional funding to match the previous £5 million total.

Set-up costs in the region of £2 million were transferred from the UK Government in 2013-14 for the SWF.

(ii) Responsibility for information and advice provision rests with both the UK and the Scottish Government. There has been not been any transfer of responsibility in this regard in relation to the recent welfare changes.

(iii) The programme budget transfer from the UK Government was £328 million for 2013-14 and £320 million for 2014-15. The Scottish Government provided an additional £23 million in both 2013-14 and 2014-15 to assist with mitigating the
10% funding gap local authorities faced.

- The Scottish Government provided a one-off sum of £4.156 million to local authorities in 2013-14 for the set-up costs of the new Council Tax Reduction (CTR) scheme.

- The UK Government's funding for local authorities' administrative costs for 2013-14 (details can be found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/226452/s5-2012.pdf) was maintained as a single subsidy for both Housing Benefit and CTR, but was partially disaggregated for CTR only cases from 2014-15 with a transfer of £7.05 million to the Scottish Government. The UK Government continues to provide funding towards local authorities’ administration costs, but this is provided direct to local authorities and it is not possible to disaggregate to identify CTR separately.

The Scottish Government is allocating £35 million in 2014-15 to mitigate the impact of the bedroom tax in Scotland. This is in addition to the £15 million funding for discretionary housing payments made available by the Department for Work and Pensions. The breakdown by local authority of the initial £20 million from the Scottish Government is described in Local Government Finance Circular 2014 No 2, available on the Scottish Government website:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Government/local-government/17999/11203.

The breakdown of funding from the Department for Work and Pensions is contained in their Housing Benefit Circulars HB S1/2014 and HB S2/2014.

The remaining £15 million of Scottish Government funding will be allocated to the 20 local authorities that still have insufficient funds to fully mitigate the bedroom tax. The distribution will be agreed with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities.

The Scottish Government has no capacity to provide funding over and above the £55 million provided in the years 2013-15. The lifting of the cap on funding for discretionary housing payments (DHPs) will create additional flexibility for local authorities to supplement their DHP funds to meet any additional local priorities.

As set out in the Scottish Budget 2013-14, the Scottish Government will invest £7 million in each of the three years from 2013-14 to 2015-16 in a range of welfare reform mitigation measures such as for advice and support services. The most recent announcement on 24 April 2014 is for the Tackling Money Worries Programme which is to be administered by the Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB).

The Scottish Government has approved that SLAB can spend up to £2.4 million on new projects focussing on supporting the outcomes of the revised Child Poverty Strategy for Scotland by connecting low income families with children to debt advice and to help them manage their money better at times where they are more vulnerable to debt.

The application period for the programme opened on 6 May 2014 and will close on
15 June 2014 after which SLAB will assess the proposals submitted. Once the bids have been assessed and applicants notified the list of successful projects will be published on the SLAB website.

Funding levels for the Scottish Welfare Fund are based on historical spend by the Department for Work and Pensions. The budget for 2014-15 is detailed in the Supporting Document to the Budget (Scotland) Bill 2014-15 which was approved by Parliament on 5 February 2014. The planned budget for 2015-16 will be published in the Draft Budget 2015-16 in the autumn.

The publication of the final report of the Expert Working Group on Welfare has not been delayed. The Group were asked to report to Ministers in spring 2014 and they are sticking to that timescale. Taking into account printing and publishing timescales, I expect that it will be published in June 2014.

There are no plans to change the definition of fuel poverty in Scotland.

In its final report on the Scottish Government’s fuel poverty strategy, published in March 2014, the independent Scottish Fuel Poverty Forum recommended, “that the definition currently used in Scotland is still relevant, but that it needs to be reviewed and updated to reflect a more accurate assessment of the energy demands with in homes in a modern age.”

Research into the robustness of the assumptions underpinning the current definition of fuel poverty was commissioned by the Scottish Government on behalf of the Scottish Fuel Poverty Forum. Members of the Forum are currently considering the results of this research and will make recommendations to Scottish Ministers in due course.

The Forum led on the research and is responsible for the final report and its publication.