Best Start Grant and Best Start Foods: Expenditure

Further information on application, processing times, redeterminations and appeals can be found in the associated publication

Not assessed

DWP publish information about Sure Start Maternity Grant in the Social Fund annual report 2020 to 2021 at Great Britain level only.

DWP also publishes annual expenditure for Sure Start Maternity Grants at Great Britain level in their Benefit expenditure and caseload tables.

Key differences between any figures for Sure Start Maternity Grant and BSG Pregnancy and Baby Payment are:

\tApplicants can only apply for Sure Start Maternity Grant for their first child. No payments are made for subsequent children (with some exceptions for multiple births) whereas BSG Pregnancy and Baby Payments is applicable for first children and subsequent children.

\tSure Start Maternity Grant payments are £500 for the first child, whereas Pregnancy and Baby Payments are £767.50 for the first child, £383.75 for subsequent children and £383.75 for multiple births.

*\tThe Sure Start Maternity Grant application window is from 11 weeks before due date to 6 months after birth, whereas BSG Pregnancy and Baby is from 24th week of pregnancy to 6 months after birth.

DWP does not have an equivalent of Early Learning Payment and School Age Payment.

The Department for Health and Social Care does not produce statistical publications covering the uptake of Healthy Start Vouchers in Scotland. However, management information on uptake has previously been published by the Scottish Government in a Freedom of Information response covering a 4 week period in 2018.

These statistics are updated every 3 months. These updates coincide with our quarterly publications on Best Start Grant and Best Start Foods payments. These can be found at the Social Security Scotland website.

Data are collected, validated and published in as timely a manner as possible in accordance with the Statistics Code of Practice. Data are published quarterly and can be found on the Social Security Scotland website.

The Scotland Act 2016 gives Scottish Parliament powers over a number of social security benefits which had been administered to Scottish claimants by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Social Security Scotland are the executive agency of Scottish Government responsible for delivering social security benefits for Scotland under the Social Security Scotland Act 2018.

Further details about all Best Start Grant payments.

1. Rounding and disclosure control
   
   Application and outcome figures have been rounded to the nearest five for disclosure control. Data has been suppressed where it would disclose fewer than five applications.
   
   2) Missing and duplicate applications
   
   The data comes from 100% data cut of the case management system.
   
   The data cut contained a small proportion of applications where the fields relating to application date and the outcome and payment of the application were blank. These applications represent temporary 'prospect cases', which are created when clients contact Social Security Scotland without a National Insurance number, and are later replaced once a National Insurance number is received from the applicant. These applications are therefore duplicates and have been excluded from the statistics.
   
   Clients can make multiple applications for different components of Best Start Grant and Best Start Foods over time, or may make repeated applications for the same component, for example if their first application is denied. This means that there can be several applications in the data cut from the same client. For this publication we have retained all these applications.
   
   3) Geography
   
   Applications are assigned to local authority and health board by postcode using a Scottish Government lookup file. For some applications, the postcode will not match to the lookup file. This can be because the postcode is not in a Scottish local authority, or because the postcode has been introduced too recently to appear on the lookup file, for example if a property is in a new development. For postcodes that could not be matched to a Scottish local authority or health board, the postcode area was used to check whether the postcode was in Scotland or elsewhere.
   
   Following these checks on postcodes, in this publication a small number of applications and payments could not be matched to a local authority or health board.
   
   Figures for the applications and payments that did not match to Scottish local authorities and health boards are provided in the official statistics publication tables.

The data used to produce these statistics are extracted from the Social Security case management system. Extracts from this system are also used on a daily basis for internal reporting within Social Security Scotland. As such, the data is checked daily for consistency with previous extracts (i.e. do applications, decisions and payments figures increase as expected over time, and are they in proportion to each other) and compared to other sources of information such as the number of payment instructions reported by the finance team.

Quality assurance and cleaning has been carried out on the variables used in the official statistics:

\tChecking for duplicate and missing application references

\tChecking application dates, processing times and payment times are within the expected ranges

\tChecking applicant and child dates of birth are within the expected ranges

\tChecking postcodes that do not match to local authorities

*\tChecking payment values match to expected number of children


Once the data is aggregated and copied into the publication and supporting Excel tables, the final statistics are quality assured by a different member of the statistics team.

Revisions and corrections to previously published statistics are dealt with in accordance with the Scottish Government Statistician Group corporate policy statement on revisions and corrections - a copy of which is available on the Scottish Government website.

Figures have been rounded to the nearest five for disclosure control. Some values are missing from this dataset. These values have been suppressed where they would disclose fewer than five applications.