Chamber and committees

Yes, the Scottish Government expects everyone affected by the bedroom tax who applies for a discretionary housing payment to be awarded one.

The Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Scotland wrote to the Deputy First Minister on 2 May 2014 to offer to provide Scottish Ministers with a power to set the statutory cap on discretionary housing payments in Scotland using section 63 of the Scotland Act 1998. The Scottish Government has accepted this offer. At their meeting on 8 May 2014, the Deputy First Minister and the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Scotland agreed to prioritise the progress of the section 63 order. The order will need to be agreed by both the Scottish and UK Governments before it is laid before both Houses of the Westminster Parliament and the Scottish Parliament. It will then go before the Privy Council. The Deputy First Minister will update the Scottish Parliament once a timescale has been agreed with the Scotland Office.

(i) The UK Government provided £23.8 million for 2013-14 and 2014-15 to the Scottish Government for the Scottish Welfare Fund (SWF).

Scottish Ministers decided to use the full allocation from the UK Government to provide local welfare assistance and provided an additional £9.2 million of funding for both of these years. The total funding available for the SWF in each of these years is £33 million.

The UK Government also transferred funding for administration costs of just over
£5 million in 2013-14, falling to just over £4.6 million in 2014-15, while the Scottish Government has again provided additional funding to match the previous £5 million total.

Set-up costs in the region of £2 million were transferred from the UK Government in 2013-14 for the SWF.

(ii) Responsibility for information and advice provision rests with both the UK and the Scottish Government. There has been not been any transfer of responsibility in this regard in relation to the recent welfare changes.

(iii) The programme budget transfer from the UK Government was £328 million for 2013-14 and £320 million for 2014-15. The Scottish Government provided an additional £23 million in both 2013-14 and 2014-15 to assist with mitigating the
10% funding gap local authorities faced.

- The Scottish Government provided a one-off sum of £4.156 million to local authorities in 2013-14 for the set-up costs of the new Council Tax Reduction (CTR) scheme.

- The UK Government's funding for local authorities' administrative costs for 2013-14 (details can be found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/226452/s5-2012.pdf) was maintained as a single subsidy for both Housing Benefit and CTR, but was partially disaggregated for CTR only cases from 2014-15 with a transfer of £7.05 million to the Scottish Government. The UK Government continues to provide funding towards local authorities’ administration costs, but this is provided direct to local authorities and it is not possible to disaggregate to identify CTR separately.

The Scottish Welfare Fund guidance sets out the ringfencing arrangements for the Fund. The Scottish Welfare Fund guidance can be found on the Scottish Government website at:

http://scotland.gov.uk/Topics/People/welfarereform/scottishwelfarefund/scottishwelfarefuindguidance.

I wrote to the Welfare Reform Committee on 2 May 2014 to advise them of our intention to introduce the Welfare Funds (Scotland) Bill in June 2014. A copy of the letter is available at:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S4_Welfare_Reform_Committee/20140502_MB-MM_Scottish_Welfare_Fund.pdf.

The Scottish Government is allocating £35 million in 2014-15 to mitigate the impact of the bedroom tax in Scotland. This is in addition to the £15 million funding for discretionary housing payments made available by the Department for Work and Pensions. The breakdown by local authority of the initial £20 million from the Scottish Government is described in Local Government Finance Circular 2014 No 2, available on the Scottish Government website:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Government/local-government/17999/11203.

The breakdown of funding from the Department for Work and Pensions is contained in their Housing Benefit Circulars HB S1/2014 and HB S2/2014.

The remaining £15 million of Scottish Government funding will be allocated to the 20 local authorities that still have insufficient funds to fully mitigate the bedroom tax. The distribution will be agreed with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities.

Communication with social tenants about their rent or housing benefit is the responsibility of local authorities and housing associations.

I refer the member to the answer to question S4W-17591 on 29 October 2013. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx.

As set out in the Scottish Budget 2013-14, the Scottish Government will invest £7 million in each of the three years from 2013-14 to 2015-16 in a range of welfare reform mitigation measures such as for advice and support services. The most recent announcement on 24 April 2014 is for the Tackling Money Worries Programme which is to be administered by the Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB).

The Scottish Government has approved that SLAB can spend up to £2.4 million on new projects focussing on supporting the outcomes of the revised Child Poverty Strategy for Scotland by connecting low income families with children to debt advice and to help them manage their money better at times where they are more vulnerable to debt.

The application period for the programme opened on 6 May 2014 and will close on
15 June 2014 after which SLAB will assess the proposals submitted. Once the bids have been assessed and applicants notified the list of successful projects will be published on the SLAB website.

This is a matter for Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS).

I am advised that HIS have published a correction to the report and the local report compendium. This can be accessed via the HIS website:

http://www.healthcareimprovementscotland.org/our_work/long_term_conditions/chronic_pain/where_are_we_now.aspx