Funeral Support Payment: Applications and Payments

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

Not assessed

Department for Work and Pensions publish information about Funeral Expense Payment in the Social Fund annual report 2022 to 2023.

Department for Work and Pensions also publishes annual expenditure for Funeral Expense Payments at Great Britain level in their Benefit expenditure and caseload tables.

Following a period of stakeholder consultation, Social Security Scotland statisticians intend to publish Funeral Support Payment statistics biannually from now on - reporting statistics to 30 September and 31 March, each year. 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 Scottish Government website.

These statistics are used by a wide range of interested parties, such as:

* The Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government (including Social Security Scotland)
* Politicians and members of the public.

They are used for a wide range of purposes including:

* Informing the general public
* Government decision making through policy making and policy monitoring
* Resource allocation

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 may make repeated applications to Funeral Support Payment in certain circumstances. For instance, if their initial application is withdrawn or denied. This means that there can be several applications from the same client in the data cut. For this publication we have retained all of these applications.
   
   3) Geography
   
   Applications are assigned to local authority area by postcode using a Scottish Statistics Postcode Lookup - National Records of Scotland (NRS) 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 area, 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 area, 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 area.
   
   Figures for the applications and payments that did not match to Scottish local authority areas 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:

-Checking for duplicate and missing application references
-Checking application dates, processing times and payment times are within the expected ranges
-Check that payment date is present where a payment value is present
-Checking postcodes that do not match to local authorities
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.

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.