Chamber and committees

The Delivery Agreement covers Local Authority facilities and, while it doesn’t prescribe specific locations or exclude other arrangements, it notes the characteristics that Social Security Scotland will look for when considering co-location. Key to the agreement is the need for facilities to be accessible and services joined up. This will help make sure that people can easily access support in locations convenient to them.

Scottish Government support for advice services is intended to maximise household resources and ensure people understand their statutory rights and have recourse to redress if those rights are not upheld.

The Scottish Government is funding a part-time welfare advice service facilitator in 2018-19 to support the embedding of Welfare Advice Services in Health and Social Care settings, with a particular focus on general practice and early years.

Provision of welfare advice is a matter for individual NHS Boards and general practices and we do not hold information centrally on where advisers are located.

Sectarian hate crime - like any hate crime - has a hugely damaging effect on victims and communities so it is important that everybody plays their part to challenge it. That is why we fully support Police Scotland in taking robust action to both tackle hate crime and increase the confidence of victims to report incidents either directly to them or to a Third Party reporting centre.

Social Security Scotland's strategic objectives will be introduced in the Agency's Corporate Plan. The Corporate Plan will be published shortly, as an interim document. As with everything it does, Social Security Scotland will develop and iterate its strategic objectives in collaboration with stakeholder communities. An updated version of the Corporate Plan, which reflects this consultation and collaboration, will be published next year.

The Scottish Government received more than 300 applications for the core group but, unfortunately, none of these were from black or minority ethnic communities.

Despite this, we remain committed to ensuring that the perspectives of seldom heard and hard to reach groups, including people from BME communities, are strongly reflected in the social security charter. To that end, we are working with stakeholders to run targeted focus groups in September to seek detailed feedback on the work completed to date. We will then invite representatives from each of the groups who participate in these sessions to join the core group.

The analysis of this survey will be published later in 2018. At this point, the findings will be shared with the Disability and Carer Benefits Expert Advisory Group via email. The group will be given the opportunity to discuss the findings and next steps with researchers from the Experience Panels team at their next meeting after publication, which is 1 November 2018.

The recruitment process to appoint new non-executive members to the Executive Advisory Body of Social Security Scotland was launched on 1 June 2018. Successful candidates have been identified and we will make the names of these non-executive members available on the Social Security Scotland website once the appointment process has fully concluded.

The first meeting of Social Security Scotland’s Audit and Assurance Committee will fall in line with the audit cycle and will take place before the end of this year.

We currently have no former DWP staff working within Social Security Scotland who have transferred under the terms of the Cabinet Office Statement of Practice.

On the 31 August there were 150 people who transferred from the Social Security Agency Implementation Division within Social Security Directorate in the Scottish Government to Social Security Scotland. The following table provides a breakdown on protected characteristics.