Chamber and committees

The service design of Disability Assistance for Children and Young People is being developed according to Agile methodology. It is not wholly contingent on the outcome of the Scottish Government’s Disability Assistance consultation, but will be substantially informed by the responses to this consultation.

The service design for Disability Assistance for Children and Young People has already begun and is ongoing.

The review of financial functions began February 2019 and is expected to conclude shortly. The purpose of the financial review is to ensure that financial arrangements are evolving as the Social Security Programme grows in scale and complexity

An internal review of the programme workforce needs to support the next phase of delivery began in December 2018, with staffing profiles agreed in April 2019 in line with Scottish Government financial processes.

The social security programme workforce review was part of our ongoing programme business and continuous improvement approach, involving a number of staff from a variety of roles across the programme and was therefore not costed separately. There was no additional financial resource committed.

The Scottish Government publishes details of all expenditure over £25,000, in accordance with the Public Sector Reform (Scotland) Act 2010.

The most recent publication was made on 10 May 2019 and relates to the month of October 2018. Previous months are also available on the Scottish Government web site. https://www.gov.scot/publications/government-spend-over-gbp25000-october-2018/ .

Social Security Scotland and Social Security Directorate do not currently and have not previously engaged any agency workers from Capita.

Both Social Security Scotland and Social Security Directorate operate under the Scottish Government Temporary and Interim Staff Services Framework. Capita are not included within this framework.

We do not hold information on the previous employers of our permanent staff.

We have made a clear commitment that profit making companies will not be involved in delivering assessments for disability benefits once devolved to Scotland.

The Scottish Government will consider feedback from the Disability Assistance Consultation in developing an approach to aligning disability benefits with existing devolved services.

Social Security Scotland works closely with the Social Security Programme on the long-term strategic workforce requirements of the devolution of benefits.

The Social Security Scotland workforce planning group is an operational working level group to embed those requirements into its recruitment activities. It was specifically initiated to manage the disability benefits and has been set up to meet at an appropriate time to manage those plans.

Social Security Scotland are on track for providing the draft unaudited annual accounts with complete working papers by 3 June 2019 as agreed with Audit Scotland.