Scottish Child Payment: Caseload

Further information on application, processing times, number of children actively benefitting from Scottish Child Payment, re-determinations and appeals can be found in the associated publication.

Not assessed

The Scottish Child Payment is the first benefit of its kind in the UK, therefore there are no comparable statistics.

These statistics are updated every three months. These updates coincide with our quarterly publications on Scottish Child Payment. 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.

Scottish Child Payment was introduced through secondary legislation, using the powers to top up a reserved benefit contained in section 79 of the Social Security Scotland Act 2018.

Social Security Scotland - the executive agency of Scottish Government responsible for delivering social security benefits for Scotland - began taking applications for Scottish Child Payment on 9 November 2020, following an announcement by the then Cabinet Secretary for Social Security and Older People that the benefit would be open for applications in advance of its official launch on 15 February 2021 to help manage the expected demand.

Further details about the benefit can be found on the Scottish Government website.

The methodology for figures on the number of children actively benefitting from Scottish Child Payment is broadly outlined below:

1) The client is actively in receipt of Scottish Child Payment as of the latest reporting period if their case remains active, and has any payment issued in the last 28 days to the latest caseload period. Additionally, if there is no payment issued because the case has only recently been approved, then the client would be deemed to be actively in receipt of Scottish Child Payment as long as the activation date is within the 7-day period to the latest reporting point in time.

2) The child is deemed to be actively benefitting from Scottish Child Payment if their parent or carer (client) is in receipt of Scottish Child Payment and their eligibility remains valid for Scottish Child Payment (including the age criteria).

There are however a few limitations with this methodology:

1) The caseload data extract is a snapshot of live information on both client's and children's eligibility. Consequently, as new payment cases for clients have been established once their applications are approved, or Change of Circumstance forms were submitted from existing clients, this can retrospectively add more children or update the existing information we hold on them. Thus, applying this methodology to caseload data extracts obtained at different points in time would yield different caseload counts for the same point in time.

2) In related to the limitation mentioned above, although a client may be identified as 'active', this does not necessarily mean all children this client is responsible for are actively benefitting from Scottish Child Payment at the latest reported point in time. It is possible that some of the children are no longer eligible if, for example, they have turned 16. Similarly, it is possible for some children to be approved for the benefit shortly after the reported point in time - and while the client would receive payments in arrears for these children, these children won't have actively benefitted as of the latest reported point in time.

As a result, for each Scottish Child Payment publication this methodology will be applied to calculate a caseload count for the latest reported point in time only i.e. no retrospective revisions to previous counts will be made unless a methodological error is discovered. For example, in the publication 'Scottish Child Payment: high level statistics to 30 September 2023', the snapshot taken on 1 November 2023 was used to report the caseload count as of 30 September 2023, but was not used to update the caseload count for previous reporting periods (30 June 2023 etc.)

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 routinely for consistency with previous extracts (i.e. do applications, decisions, payments and caseload 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 dates of birth for applicants and their children are within the expected range
* 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.

The geographical area (i.e. Council Areas, 2022 Intermediate Zones, and 2011 Intermediate Zones) is based on clients' postcode information, rather than their children. Some clients' postcode information cannot be matched to a Scottish geographical area because their postcode is not on the Scottish Statistics Postcode Lookup file used to match postcode to geographical area. This can be because clients' postcode information was not correct, or the postcode was too new to be on the postcode lookup file. Consequently, those children with unknown geographical area are excluded from this dataset. The impact of this exclusion is minimal as those children account for less than 0.2% of all children actively benefitting from Scottish Child Payment.

A minor anomaly was identified in the code used to produce the number of children and clients actively benefitting from Scottish Child Payment as of 31 March 2025, reported in Tables 9-14 within the 'Scottish Child Payment statistics to 31 March 2025' publication. Analysis shows that the number of children activity benefitting from Scottish Child Payment as of 31 March 2025 was underreported by 0.2%. There was no impact on the trend for Scottish Child Payment caseload over time and no impact to any other tables. An explanation of the changes is also included in the Social Security Scotland - Data and Methodology Changes document at this time.

In general, the caseload figures for each Scottish Child Payment publication should be final, and no retrospective revisions to previous figures will be made unless a methodological error is discovered.

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 statistical disclosure control. Data has been suppressed where it would disclose fewer than five children.

Any cell in this dataset which is blank contains suppressed data. Therefore, caution should be exercised if summary data is calculated; it may include blank cells in which it will not be a true representation of geographical area totals.