Pension Age Disability Payment

Further information on new applications and clients who have had their awards transferred, award types, processing times and re-determinations can be found in the associated publication.

Not assessed

Not assessed

These statistics are updated every 3 months and relate to the quarterly publications on Pension Age Disability Payment. These can be found on the Scottish Government website.

Data is collected, validated and published in as timely a manner as possible in accordance with the Statistics Code of Practice.

The Scotland Act 2016 gave the Scottish Parliament powers over Attendance Allowance, which is currently administered in Scotland by the Department for Work and Pensions. Pension Age Disability Payment is a replacement for Attendance Allowance in Scotland. It is administered by Social Security Scotland, which is the executive agency responsible for delivering Scottish Government social security benefits.
Pension Age Disability Payment will support people of State Pension age who have a disability or long-term health condition that means they need assistance with looking after themselves, or supervision to keep them safe. Pension Age Disability Payment launched in five pilot local authority areas on 21 October 2024:

\u2022 Argyll & Bute

\u2022 Highland

\u2022 Aberdeen City

\u2022 Orkney

\u2022 Shetland

Pension Age Disability Payment is due to be available in another 13 local authority areas from 24 March 2025, with the benefit set to be launched nationally on 22 April 2025.
Clients in Scotland who already receive Attendance Allowance will have their award automatically transferred to Pension Age Disability Payment. This process will begin early 2025. The process is automatic, with no need for clients to do anything. Social Security Scotland will write to clients in advance of their award transferring.

Not assessed

The data used to produce official statistics are the same as the data extracted from the case management system on a daily basis that is used 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.
Additional quality assurance and cleaning has been carried out on the variables used in the official statistics to:

* Check for duplicate and missing application references.
* Check for duplicate and missing applicant identification numbers.
* Check application dates are within the expected ranges.
* Check that payment date is present where a payment value is present.
* Check postcode lengths are within the expected ranges and check
postcodes that do not match to local authorities
* Remove a small number of test applications which were used to test the case management system.

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. The final documents are checked by the lead statistician.

Each updated publication of Pension Age Disability Payment statistics may include revisions going back to October 2024. This is because each time figures are published they will be based from a new 100% data cut from the case management system, which can include retrospective changes to data going back to October 2024. More recent months tend to be subject to a greater degree of revision than more distant ones.

Application and outcome figures have been rounded to the nearest five for disclosure control. The number of payments has been rounded to the nearest five for disclosure control. Data has been suppressed where it would disclose fewer than five applications: denoted with an asterisk [*] in the open data.