First, as Chris Goulden said, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that awareness-raising campaigns work when they are done, but there are far fewer being done at the UK level than in the past. At the Scottish level, that is just winding up, as the new benefits are devolved. It is not that the campaigns do not work; it is just that we are not doing as many as we probably should.
Alongside those campaigns, as Chris Goulden and a few participants said today, there are trusted advice and contact points, where the co-location of services allows people to understand that they are potentially eligible for benefits and helps people to apply. That is easier for a stable pool of people who might be eligible for benefits. For example, those eligible for child-related benefits are a stable pool. It is much more likely that a person will understand that they are eligible for such benefits than, for example, for some disability benefits, for which people change their eligibility quickly.
We are interested in what automation can do in the Scottish context to drive the take-up as high as we can get it. There are a few elements to that.
Given capacity issues at the agency as we roll out, in the short-term, maybe we cannot go to automation across the board. However, we should not rule out automation for some streams. For example, we are hugely supportive of the new Scottish child payment. It is now coming earlier—in 2020. We could begin to automate for some legacy benefits, such as child tax credit. As you can see from the take-up figures, that has high penetration into the cohort in question. If we can automate for that benefit, we could probably bite off a large proportion of the people who are eligible for the Scottish child payment.
Over the long term, we are interested in how we can make possible automation for all benefits and, in the short term, automation for some. Pauline McNeill is right to suggest that the general data protection regulation is not necessarily a block to that. If, at the start, we ask for people’s data to be used in a certain way, it can be.
The design and the take-up of the Scottish child payment are incredibly important but are potentially a Cinderella issue. How we collect data through the Scottish child payment and the other Scottish benefits, which allow us to use those benefits as a gateway to other forms of financial and non-financial help, could be the holy grail. Although maximising people’s financial help is important, going beyond that into the non-financial help that we can offer to those groups of people could be an approach to social security that is different from the approach down south.
Local awareness campaigns work. There are opportunities for automation in the short term and in the long term.