Chamber and committees

The Scottish Fiscal Commission publish estimates and forecasts of eligibility and payments for Scottish Child Payment and Best Start Grant but only for Scotland. There are no estimates or forecasts of eligibility and take-up (the proportion of eligible children that receive payments) by area within Scotland. Their figures cannot be used to inform eligibility or take-up rates for East Kilbride specifically.

Social Security Scotland publish statistics for applications and payments for Scottish Child Payment and Best Start Grant by local authority areas (including South Lanarkshire) but not at constituency level and statistics for 2023-24 are not yet available.

However, internal Scottish Government analysis suggests around 5500 children in East Kilbride are eligible for Scottish Child Payment in 2023-24 and around 1000 for Best Start Grant. Of those, it is estimated around 4500 children will receive Scottish Child Payment and around 1000 children will receive Best Start Grant.

These figures have been rounded to the nearest five hundred to reflect the fact they are approximate estimates and use national level eligibility and take-up rates. We have not provided specific estimates for each Best Start Grant payment due to the uncertainty associated with such small numbers however the number of children eligible for Best Start Grant are expected to be roughly spread evenly across the three different payment types. Since Early Learning Payment and School Age Payment are paid automatically to eligible clients already receiving Scottish Child Payment but Pregnancy and Baby Payment is not, we would expect slightly fewer children to receive this payment than the other Best Start Grants. See Table 1:

Table 1: Estimated number of children in East Kilbride constituency forecast to be eligible for and receive Scottish Child Payment and Best Start Grant, 2023-24.