Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government has no capacity to provide funding over and above the £55 million provided in the years 2013-15. The lifting of the cap on funding for discretionary housing payments (DHPs) will create additional flexibility for local authorities to supplement their DHP funds to meet any additional local priorities.

The Scottish Welfare Fund comprises of Community Care Grants and Crisis Grants.

The table below shows how many applications contained someone on a sanctioned benefit during the period 1 April to 31 December 2013.

For Community Care Grants, 31 applications in total contained someone who had been sanctioned. Of these 31, 12 applications were successful in receiving a Community Care Grant.

For Crisis Grants, 400 applications in total contained someone who had been sanctioned. Of these 400, 165 applications were successful in receiving a Crisis Grant.

The Scottish Welfare Fund guidance regarding sanctions changed in April 2014. The data in the above analysis pre-dates this change.

Statistics on the Scottish Welfare Fund can be found at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Social-Welfare/swf

The Scottish Welfare Fund comprises of Community Care Grants and Crisis Grants.

The number of applications that were accepted and rejected by gender was previously answered in S4W-20605 on 2 May 2014. 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.

The following tables show the number of applications which were accepted and rejected by gender of the main applicant and by local authority. Tables are provided separately for Community Care Grants and Crisis Grants.

Table 1: Community Care Grant Decisions by Gender of Main Applicant and Local Authority.

Note: All figures have been rounded to the nearest five applications.

Table 2: Crisis Grant Decisions by Gender of Main Applicant and Local Authority.

Note: All figures have been rounded to the nearest five applications.

Further statistics on the Scottish Welfare Fund can be found at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Social-Welfare/swf.

Funding levels for the Scottish Welfare Fund are based on historical spend by the Department for Work and Pensions. The budget for 2014-15 is detailed in the Supporting Document to the Budget (Scotland) Bill 2014-15 which was approved by Parliament on 5 February 2014. The planned budget for 2015-16 will be published in the Draft Budget 2015-16 in the autumn.

(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 comprises of Community Care Grants and Crisis Grants.

For Community Care Grants, £14.3 million was distributed between 1 April 2013 and 31 December 2013. Information on the distribution by local authority is published in Table 15 at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Social-Welfare/swf/AprilDec2013.

For Crisis Grants, £3.7 million was distributed between 1 April 2013 and 31 December 2013. Information on the distribution by local authority is published in Table 16 of the publication.

Statistics on the Scottish Welfare Fund can be found at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Social-Welfare/swf.

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.

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.

The Scottish Government strongly disagrees with the UK Government’s proposed reduction of support for hard to treat properties. We have written to the UK Government flagging up concerns over this switch of focus which will undermine investment in energy efficiency, jobs in the insulation industry and progress in tackling fuel poverty and climate change.

In Scotland’s Future, we set out how, given the powers of independence, we would remove the cost of the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) and Warm Homes Discount from household energy bills providing year on year savings while maintaining investment in energy efficiency. With our existing powers, we are taking action through our Home Energy Efficiency Programmes for Scotland (HEEPS) to mitigate the impact of these changes as far as possible.

Following extensive engagement with our stakeholders the Scottish Government recently responded to the UK Government’s consultation on proposed changes to the ECO. We raised the importance of this issue and requested that the impacts are mitigated as much as possible and that the UK Government’s final plans following consultation address this. We also gave councils greater flexibility on our HEEPS: ABS (Area Based Schemes), including increasing the maximum grant available, to ensure they could continue to deliver more expensive measures to hard to treat properties.