 Welcome to the 12th meeting of the Social Justice and Social Security Committee. Apologies have been received by Natalie Donne and Foisel Choudhury. Our first item of business today is a decision to take item 5 in private. Are we all agreed? The next item is an evidence session on the performance and operation of Social Security Scotland. Members visited the Social Security Scotland headquarters in Dundee on 1 November, and I'm pleased to welcome you all for the first time to the committee this morning. We had a wonderful visit last month and very much appreciated that opportunity. This morning, we are joined by David Wallace, the chief executive of Social Security Scotland, James Wallace, who is the deputy director for finance and corporate services, and Miriam Craven, the deputy director for strategy, change, data and engagement. I'll invite David Wallace, please, to make any opening remarks. Thank you, convener, and good morning, committee. Thank you very much for the invitation to come and speak today. I really do appreciate it, and it is lovely to be here in person as well. Just to add my thanks for those members who were able to take the time and come and visit us in Agnes Husband House in Dundee. It was lovely to see you there and I thought it was a really helpful visit from our perspective, so hopefully you got something from it too. I really welcome the opportunity this morning to take questions on our recent publications, principally the annual report and accounts and the supporting charter measurement framework and the charter, the client survey as well. I should briefly introduce my colleagues. On my right is James Wallace, and on my left is Miriam Craven. James and Miriam will assist us with the session this morning. This is our third annual report and account since the agency was launched back in 2018, and it covers the period of April 2020 up to March 2021, a year where, like everybody else, clearly Covid had really been with us for the duration of that year. I just wanted to draw out some of the key highlights that I saw in the annual report and accounts, and principally I should put on record that I am incredibly proud that the agency managed to maintain our services to clients throughout that period of time as well, working through the pandemic. That involves successfully moving the vast majority of our staff to work from home, and indeed the vast majority remain there just now as well, so that was no mean feat. It also required some very rapid systems development, so to allow that to happen, we had to move very quickly on our call answering system, and in particular introduced a brand new web chat, which has remained popular as well. I am really pleased at that, but we didn't just stand still from that. We also welcomed over 400 new colleagues into the organisation during that time, and we had to do that using both virtual recruitment and virtual induction as well, so that was a big shift in terms of our approach. Doing that allowed us to introduce a further three benefits in Scotland, two of which were brand new to people in Scotland being the job start payment and also what has been described as the game-changing Scottish child payment, which is from Social Security Scotland's perspective by far the largest benefit so far. All of that has allowed us to make over 900,000 payments to people across 10 benefits, and that totals now over £100 million of money that would not otherwise have been received by people in Scotland, which we have been able to make. You will notice that in this year's annual report and account, a significant difference now is the inclusion of all the devolved benefits, including those that are processed for us by DWP. That is the first set of accounts that covers both those directly delivered and those agency agreement ones as well. As you know, how we deliver benefits is as important as to what we deliver as well, so I was really pleased that the annual report captured some feedback from the charter measurement research, and you will see that in the annual report and accounts as well. It is again the first time that we have been able to carry out such a full survey of the charter measurement. Previously, we had either been limited in terms of year or we would have it slightly skewed towards one benefit, so I think that that is a really important milestone and really important insight from our clients. Briefly, I just want to pull out a couple of figures from that, so I was really delighted that 92 per cent of those who took part in the client survey said that their experience was either good or very good and that clients who spoke to our staff found our staff both knowledgeable and approachable. The particular one that I always focus on in the charter measurement was that 94 per cent of respondents agreed that when they spoke to the organisation they had been treated with kindness, which I think is a really key measure for me in terms of a different service in Scotland. I am really proud of what Social Security Scotland achieved through what has undoubtedly been a challenging year. We are not complacent in any way. We absolutely know that Social Security Scotland is a work in progress and it will be a number of years before we reach something that looks like a steady-state organisation. However, I think that we have laid some good foundations of building a new public service and we have done that, which I should draw out, where the majority of our staff now have not set foot in a building and the majority of our staff we have been working for longer since we were established with restrictions and without, so it is unusual circumstances. We do not do that alone. We do that with very close joint working with the Scottish Government's Social Security directorate programme and, again, we have a number of joint activities in preparedness for the future benefits to come as well. Since, obviously, we have published the annual report on accounts as well that child disability payment prior to pilot has now gone nationally live as well, so particularly pleased to see that. I am happy to take any questions. Thank you very much indeed, Mr Wallace. That is greatly appreciated. I will now turn to questions from colleagues. Allow up until around half past 10 for this section before we move on to the next item of business that we have on the first questions from Marie McNair, please. Thank you, convener, and good morning. It is great to see you again and thanks for taking the time to meet with us in Dundee. I really found it very helpful. We have got a few questions. We want a human rights-based approach that includes the importance of access to redeterminations and appeals, and the number of appeals seems very low, and the staff knowledge around it seems poor. I think that there was 40 quoted in the report. How do we promote the right appeal to staff and claimants? It is a very small number, and I think that it is a small number so that I would be hesitant about drawing conclusions from the small numbers. I would also look across the whole of the redetermination and appeals processes as well. As you know, one of the key features that we were trying to do differently in Social Security Scotland was to make that whole process easier and accessible. The way that redeterminations are dealt with within the organisation—I might bring my name in to say a little bit more about that—leads to some of the lower levels of appeals in the system. For example, if somebody asks for a redetermination, as you know through the passage of the bill, that is something that has stood back from and looked entirely separately. The approach has been that the team dealing with that would be in contact with the client as well, so we will find that a large number of cases are dealt with through that redetermination period before they get to the appeals period as well. I do not know my name if you want to add something to that. In terms of raising awareness about how to make a redetermination, when we tell clients their original decision, we also include information in that about how to lodge for a redetermination. They can do that over the phone or they can do that on paper as well, so it is about that encouraging of letting people know how to do it. As David has said as well, we make sure that the journey that somebody goes on, they are having engagement with the team who looks after them. You also mentioned about the staff and making sure that the staff are aware. As we have grown as an organisation over the last year, it is important to make sure that it is a key part of the training and also how to have a smooth transition. If you phone up and want to be put through to the team who deals with the redeterminations, it is also about working with our stakeholders as we roll out each new benefit. It is an important part to make sure that when we are raising that awareness and doing the engagement with the people who are supporting people and giving that advice and guidance around it to make sure that they understand the redetermination process as well. The last thing that I would add is that I agree with David that for us it is important that the ambition around if we need to change a decision at redeterminations, that is an encouraged approach that we have because normally you get a new piece of evidence then at that stage and we would overturn our decision and that is why you see less moving to that appealed stage because it is acting on the case at that stage in the redetermination process. The staff survey responses indicated that some staff found internal redetermination process quite complicated. How is organisation responding to that feedback from the survey? I will come in on that. Just before I answer that, just to briefly add to Miriam's point as well, I think that it is also important to recognise the new advocacy contract that has come in place since the set of publications that we are looking at as well and we will be doing more work to make sure that that is highlighted. Obviously, there is a balance for us to ensure that that advocacy contract is seen as fully independent from the organisation, so our role is to make sure that people are made aware of it rather than to necessarily be seen as an additional part of the agency. However, in terms of awareness, we have a very new organisation. As I said in the opening remarks, the vast majority of people have joined in a way that they have not been into our buildings and have not gone through the process that we would have liked to round about consolidation. It is one of the areas that we are looking at as to how we bring people into the organisation now. We think that virtual recruitment works pretty well, and virtual induction works pretty well, but there is just something about getting people up to that, knowing the job, which is really difficult to find a substitute from just being in and around a team and learning from that team. There are things that we do when people will have a buddy when they join the organisation, but there is just the slight behaviour of being reticent to have that approach to a buddy in a virtual world versus if you could just put your hand up and shout across the table of how do I do that. When I learned how to do case work many years ago, that was the real thing. You learned from the team around about it, you heard a difficult call going in, and you learned just how a more experienced colleague dealt with a call on the phone. That is the thing that we have really struggled to recreate. We are hopeful now and we are bringing people back for some of that consolidation training to try and replicate that as well. What would you do to improve the call waiting in the processing times? I think that if you are looking at the numbers from the annual report and accounts, obviously that does also cover a period, which, as I said in the opening remarks, was covered by Covid. At the early stage of Covid, we did make the decision to send people to work from home, and the one bit of technology that was not portable then was the telephony system. For a period of time, we were unable to handle incoming calls. We went through a series of developments, so we went through from a very basic. We gave people mobile phones and people could log a call and we could phone back out. Eventually, we got some more tactical solutions in place to put that online. The annual report and account covers a period that was difficult, because we simply did not have the technology in place to answer inbound calls. As you will know, what we have now published for all the individual benefits is a full set of performance information in terms of processing and telephony times. I think that you will see from some of the data coming out for this financial year that we have continued to improve that. The call waiting times will go up and down depending on benefit launches and other activities. Fundamentally, I would say that the period that we are looking at covers a point that was particularly tricky. I will leave it there for theme 1, but I will come back in later. Next is Pam Duncan-Glancy's question time. Thank you, convener. Good morning. It is nice to see you again. It is good to do it in person, I would agree. I fully acknowledge that the results of the client survey were relatively, in fact, pretty overwhelmingly positive. I am just really, really keen that where there were some improvements suggested that could be made that we nip that in the body quite quickly, so I have a couple of questions around that. In particular, one in four people felt that they weren't able to challenge the decision that was taken by Social Security Scotland. I am wondering what you are going to do about that, given what we know about the inability for people to challenge decisions in other areas of social security, particularly in the DWP. I am also keen to know that, by all the redeterminations that were made, half of them were successful. That is quite a lot, and I know that there weren't many made, but all the ones that were, because half of them were successful, I am keen to know what you are going to do to address the original problems that caused the problem in the decision-making. I have another couple of questions on that theme, but I will come back to them if that is okay. I will take the first one first. I might pull Miriam into both of those questions as well. On the client survey and charter measurement information, it is quite a recent document for us as well as for the committee. We published that in November, which was the same time that the organisation was getting that information as well. Miriam can say a little bit more about the structure within the organisation as to how we take some of that information back and put improvements in it as well. However, I would see it also as part of a far wider, just a culture of continuous improvement that we are trying to embed in the organisation. You will see some things in the annual report and account about very practical examples of when feedback has been given and we have been able to take some direct action as a result of it, except that it is not on the point that you have raised there. However, we are keen that we can demonstrate that the client tells us something or stakeholders tell us something and we can take some direct action. The annual report and account has some very practical examples of that. I will come back to another point, but I might just let Miriam say about how the teams in the agency are dealing with that. The team who has produced the report has run into the charter measurement framework, working very closely across the organisation to bring the findings to people who can implement the changes and respond to it. That is about working across the board with our colleagues who work in that front-line client delivery side and looking at what has been said from a client and the staff viewpoint and also through our change process about how we prioritise what changes we need to see, whether that be in the system or the wording of a letter. It forms, as David said, part of that continuous improvement, but also within our governance structure that we have. We have an insight team who would be looking at what are the teams coming out, what are the findings and then how do we marry that up to see the improvements. As David said, it is one part, because we also look at what we hear within internal audit and also we have a feedback structure where both clients and staff can give us that. I do not know if you want to answer first around why we overturn some of those decisions. As you say, the numbers are quite small, but the overturning, for me, is looking more at that in a little bit more detail. I think that it is really good that we overturn those decisions, because when you are looking at the benefits that are covered within this reporting time, it is one-off payments or the low-income benefits space and most of those rely on making sure that somebody is in receipt of a benefit at a UK level. What is happening is that, when the first decision has been made, people have not actually received their UK benefit yet, so we then have to wait. When they come into the redetermination process, we may get new evidence that says that they are now in receipt, so we overturn rather than putting the person through to go to appeal stage. It is new evidence normally coming in, or it can be that there was something that was an oversight and we had not seen that that documentation was supplied, so we encourage that overturning at that stage to bring that improvement in. Just to briefly back up, I mean that I am still a little bit of what I would have said there, but I think that there is a really important cultural point about the organisation not being afraid to overturn a decision. We deliberately not set what is a target level, as I said in the opening statement, when we are still just three years into doing this, understanding what a cycle looks like, understanding what a good or bad level of that overturning is. As an organisation we certainly do not want to imply that a certain level is the right level. We want those to be proper decisions made differently from the first decision, and if the evidence is now there to do that, we would do it, but I do not want to create an organisation that fears overturning a previously made decision. It is again small numbers, a small cycle in terms of payments, and I think that we are still developing what potentially good or bad looks like in terms of an overturning level. That is reassuring. I am really pleased that there is not that kind of arbitrary cut-off in terms of overturning. In terms of the workforce and its ability to refer on to other agencies, if we are to get to a system that is much more automated and less reliant on individuals having to talk to too many people at once, we probably need to make sure that those referral processes are tight. I also note that you are now part of the Tell Me Once programme. What are your plans to address the staff capacity to refer on to other agencies? What can you learn or what do you know about the Tell Me Once process? I know that that is when someone dies. Is there anything that you can replicate from that type of process that could be used at the other end of the scale when people begin to apply for their benefits and that you could only tell the state as it were if you were the state party or the state organisation once? I will do that in a slightly reverse order. The Tell Me Once is a well-trodden, well-understood and a good thing in terms of removing stress and elements on clients and difficult circumstances. Slightly referring back to the session that we had in Dundee, we know that there is a degree of automation that both our stakeholders and clients would like to see in a system that is just where we are in terms of development that we do not yet have. I think that there is a lot of demand around about making the once easier. Some of that will be able to do as we launch benefits. Some of that might be slightly further down the track in terms of further things. For the benefits that we do, we try to ensure that we are not asking clients for multiple information for multiple benefits. You see that through the series of best start grant, for example, and how that integrates with the same application for Scottish child payments so that we are not asking people an application per benefit as such. We are trying to build that into our own benefits, but it will take a little bit longer when it is more mature before we can do some of the automation that is probably being looked for. The first part of that question was about staff awareness. That again is a bit of a process that is on-going. Particularly given two weeks ago, Monday, we launched our local delivery service, where, if people wanted to come for that pre-application support, particularly on disability benefits, they launched to coincide with the national launch of child disability payment. That is where a lot of that intelligence will be, and that referral will be. The national obvious points of referral, as it were, are that they have done an awful lot of work on the ground with more local stakeholders so that they are embedded in some of those organisations and they will go to where those organisations are so that there are both national and local referrals available. That is clearly quite embryonic in terms of how that is operating and has only been in place for a couple of weeks. I do not know my name as then. Do you want to add to that? I would just add that in terms of the referral process, we understand the importance of having that. It is making sure that there is no wrong door policy when you come looking for the information to give you that support. We also have to build a good strong robust structure around that to make sure that this is people's data that we are sharing. We need to be really mindful of the fact that how you get that permission to be allowed to say that we want to refer you to another organisation and what that looks like. We are making sure that we take the time to build a good robust structure. We have seen some good evidence around the country of referrals that work really well, but it is making sure that we build something that we can use at a national level and a local level as well. Before I bring in Jeremy Balfour for the next set of questions, I would like to pick up on a couple of things that you have mentioned, both in your opening statement and in response to questions already, Mr Wallace. First of all, it is around Covid and lessons from Covid. Can I just say on behalf of the committee thank you to your staff for all that you have been doing during the pandemic and, like all public, private and third sector organisations, the adaptions that have had to be made have obviously been significant. I wonder what lessons you have learnt in terms of your experiences during Covid, both in terms of your relationship with the people who rely on your services but also in terms of your own organisational structure and whether there have been any changes that you would be looking to make to your organisation as a result of your experiences during the pandemic. Gosh, I will do the organisational back to front if that is okay. Again, I think that, like all organisations, we are still grappling with some of the implications of what Covid has looked like. The positive aspects, I think, we know that we can run services in a different way, building in flexibility that our staff would be looking for in terms of a more hybrid scale of work. We have an active project in the organisation that is exploring what that hybrid might look like. However, as an organisation, we will not return to what we had previously, where everybody was in at a desk five days a week. That, in common, with lots of organisations is not what we will go back to. James might want to say more about an active project that we have looking at. That is live at the moment, and that is common across lots of organisations. In response, as I was saying earlier, I think that it is also clearer now of some of the things that we cannot do. The areas where we would want to get teams together to do more of the transformational work, more of the forward think of work and more of the staff development, again just that point about how you bring people on as well. I know the emerging work about what that means to the workforce, particularly the younger workforce, how you bring them through and give them role models as well. From an organisational point of view, the big thing for us is that we know that we can run the services slightly differently, and that is where we will try to pursue it. The impact in terms of how we work with our clients is probably emerging as we do more of the local delivery, for example. So some of that has been through the use of video, for example, and I think that that has been well received. The original model that local delivery would be face-to-face, there will be a place for that, and we will absolutely ensure that where face-to-face is needed, we will make sure that happens. However, I think that there is something about the behaviour of clients and society that is a large now that is probably more used to interacting in a digital way, so we will want to try to make sure that we get some of the advantages of that. However, I should absolutely just be clear that that does not mean that we are backing away from channel choice in that sense. People will have how they want to interact with the organisation as a really important one. I think that that is just emerging and again in common with everyone else, just understanding what the period of working from home in particular has done both to the culture of the organisation but also people's health and wellbeing as well of our own internal staff, so there is trying to get that into balance. Thank you, that is helpful. In terms of data, we will come back in future sessions around the data that you capture in terms of some of the bigger benefits that are coming on stream, particularly around adult and child disability, but I am keen to explore with you the challenges that you have had with regard to the data that you would need access to from other organisations, particularly the DWP, and that has obviously been a challenge in terms of the roll-out of the Scottish child payment that had to be delayed because of delays to data coming on board for you being able to access eligibility because obviously that is dependent on universal credit. How challenging has that been for you and what are you doing to try to overcome those issues in terms of ensuring that you are getting access to the data that you need? I will go back to Milton's statement when I was saying that the way we work with the Scottish Government and the Social Security programme is really important in here as well. Social Security Scotland is responsible for the live benefits and clearly we will not go into a live benefit world if there is jubiety over whether or not we can get the data that we need to support applications. A lot of how we get data from DWP in particular is established during that programme element as we are looking at the service and how we support and build a system before it goes live. It is probably a question that is best asked either of ministers or Scottish Government in terms of that. By the time it comes to us, there is no doubt as to whether or not we can access the data that we need. We cannot go into a live benefit situation if we are unsure about whether we have the data. I think that I would draw the line between the activity that is needed before we get that assurance and then as we go live. However, as accountable officer for the organisation, I would not be going into a live benefit world if we were still having to negotiate over whether or not we could get the data that we needed. We may come on to in terms of agile development in a different area, but how we access that data is maybe a factor of it, but getting the data has to be established before we go live. I wonder why I could move on to the issue of overpayments. We all know that that happens regularly, particularly for what happens not very often, but it does happen. When I was a member of the tribunals, we had to hear some of those cases. With the adult benefits being transferred, next year that will probably become more of a live issue than other benefits at the moment. What methodology are you going to use? Clearly, we want to keep the finding principles of dignity, respect and so on. However, at the same time, there are people out there who do claim fraudulently. How will that be investigated and what way will you use to deal with that? I will certainly bring James in to say a little bit more about that. In general, I think that we would draw some distinction between fraud and overpayments, obviously. Again, that was a source of debate as some of the legislation passed through as well. We have an absolute zero-tolerance policy to fraud. We are building up our fraud, counter fraud capability and our investigation powers so that we can tackle fraud where we see fraud in the system. James can say more, but we have a growing expertise around how we tackle fraud, and there is a zero-tolerance policy to that. The distinction between how overpayments occur versus fraud is obviously not all overpayments of course of fraud. That was one of the key things that clients and stakeholders would tell us about the system of destigmatising some of that. There is a complex system, and we are now having a system across two ourselves and DWP, so there will be overpayment in that system. It is important not to refer to all of that as being fraudulent. That is slightly different. We cannot recover overpayments where that has been made as a result of error. You will have seen that through your own experience of people who, from no fault of their own, had been effectively hit with a large overpayment, and the recovery of that had significant impacts on it. There is a bit of a line around overpayments where it is realistically expected that the client has told us something. At that point, there is a line between that and how we recover it. We are looking at recovery, so we will have regard to the common financial arrangement so that we are not leaving people in circumstances that are inappropriate. James, I do not know if you want to say a little bit more about the recovery of overpayments. I think that that is a very good question. How do you build dignity, fairness and respect into the recovery of overpayments? I think that it was considered when the Social Security Act was going through Parliament at 665 of the act, which places an obligation on the agency to take account of the individual's financial circumstances. David is absolutely correct. We would only recover an overpayment through fraud or error where it is the client's fault, where it is our fault, where it is an official error. We do not recover the client. It has no liability unless it is larger or obvious, which means fairly rarely. It is the difference between, if a client is expecting £100 and we send them £100,000, that would never happen. However, if that was the case, it would be large and obvious, whereas if we accidentally paid the client £101 as opposed to £100, we would say that the client is clearly not going to realise that it is a pound, so we would not seek to recover that. Official error only in specified circumstances. Client error is different, and that is for section 65 of the act. We use the common financial tool, and we will use the common financial tool to assess the client's circumstances to make sure that we are taking account of the client's ability to pay. We would not want to push anyone into hardship. That is the bit that is different from other public sector organisations. I do not think that it will affect recovery, and I need to go on and say a little bit about that. Through the period of Covid, we have paused recovery, so I think that recognising people's financial circumstances, we put a pause on recovery. It is fair to say, and you will see from our annual reporting accounts that the levels of debt are fairly small at the moment. There was no significant issue with pausing recovery, and it felt like the right thing to do. That is getting ready to restart, which is useful for the team. I can move on to your next point about counter fraud. In the intervening Covid period, I have been building my fraud error debt teams. Those are all well staffed and trained. Audit Scotland has recognised the good progress that we have made towards our arrangements for counter fraud. They are all highly trained counter fraud specialists. We have invested heavily in that area. We are prepared for the bigger benefits—the child disability payment that has just gone live and the adult disability payment when it goes live. We have robust arrangements in place now to be able to respond to fraud error and make use of the principles and act to guide the way in which we recover. I had a case once where someone would do £1,000 and get £110,000. I never declared it, but we will move on from that. One of the things that has been difficult under the present system for DWP is that every year you get your annual letter and it says in a paragraph 4, if your circumstances have changed, you need to let us know. I suspect that most people, including myself, will never read that line. People's circumstances do change. We need more benefit or we need less benefit. I am not convinced of one line in our annual letter. How do you see the new agency communicating more effectively with people who are being transferred on from PIP? If that goes worse or better, how will that be communicated to them in a more enlightening way? I should put on record that we have things in place to stop multiple hundreds of thousands going out the door. It is a really good point. When we speak to DWP, it is the point that they would say is the really difficult thing of change of circumstances. The vast majority of that overpayment comes in is not somebody being unclear about their circumstances at the point of application. It is that point of change. It is one of those things. I think that I would have to look at the service design. Again, adult disability is still in that service design place as to how we do it. I think that you are right to identify as the agency goes more into those recurring payments. Until recently, the agency generally had one-off payments. We make an application and we take a view at it. The circumstances are right. Yes, we make a payment. As we go into that recurring element of payments, it is where that can become a far bigger issue. You are right. If that goes on for a number of years, that can accumulate quite rapidly. Under what we are describing, if it is reasonable that somebody should have told us that change, we would consider that to be recoverable overpayment. How we communicate that out will be really important. We will certainly take the service design point away, because you are right. Having it in a letter is fine, but it cannot be the only thing. There is probably some work for us to do with both stakeholder organisations, possibly to how technology operates in that as well. At the moment, I do not remember if you are any closer to how we say that. What is important is the user-centred design. As you rightly said, Jeremy, the chance of everybody reading every line in detail is a challenge. It is working with our client base to understand the wording of our letters and how they are landing, the length of them, the technical language and making sure that it is plain English. We work around inclusive communication to make sure that we can have things in different languages. We can also make sure that we meet the principles around what is good inclusive communication. Part of the design of the application form itself has been about that in conjunction with the users to make sure that the clients who will use the application understand how that works. That includes things such as images or how we describe things. The final part is that it is the feedback coming back into the organisation, so it is being able to quickly adapt to the feedback that we get to change it. In the change of circumstances in particular, going back to what David said at the beginning about a measure such as kindness, we want to be an organisation that you feel you can come and talk to to say that my circumstances have changed in one way or another. It is that part of how we are embedded across our client base to make sure that they know that we are available to do that, but the key is that wording, making sure that it is plain English, that it is inclusive and that it is understood by people. Thank you very much indeed. That is very helpful. Marie McNair, followed by Miles Briggs, please. On the issue of water payments from fraud and error, are there any figures available in how they can break up between fraud and error? We have some early figures certainly on error, and again James might want to say a little bit about that. Fraud again, to draw those distinctions, the legislation we have essentially only denotes something as fraud after we have been through the investigation and are clear that something is indeed fraudulent. Again, just where we are in the process of development, I think I am right in saying that the annual report accounts report zero for fraud in that sense, because we have not been through that process necessarily yet. I think that that is an important element of not trying to get those two things confused. The question from Mr Balfour is a really good one. That is where most of the water payments occur, and I think how that makes sure that we do not automatically assume that that is fraudulent is really important. Fraud, I think that I am right in saying that James is probably reporting in terms of zero in terms of benefit expenditure, just because we have not gone through that process yet. We are reporting certainly error in terms of the DWP expenditure, and I think that we are just working through the methodology at the moment as to how we will report and estimate that for our own benefit expenditure, if I do not have James at the end, you want to add. I think that the bulk of the fraud and error, as the bulk of the benefits are administered under agency agreements, the DWP produces fairly extensive fraud and error statistics for us. They are well tried and tested at it. They have been doing it for many years. In terms of our annual report and accounts, we report error on our benefits. David is absolutely correct that the agency does not make decisions on fraud. We would report suspected fraud to the Crown Office Proculative Fiscal Service, and the courts will make a decision on what is fraud, so it does not become fraud for us until a successful prosecution is secured, if that is indeed the case. However, there is data in our annual report and accounts on page 57. How does the overpayment recovery practice in social security Scotland differ from the DWP? That is a good question. I am not wholly familiar with how DWP would operate that, and our experience of it has been both limited and interrupted by Covid. As James had said earlier, we deliberately made the decision to suspend that recovery during a difficult financial period. We are only just starting to think about restarting that and making sure that we have our strategy in place at the moment. Probably one of the big differences from what I am aware of, but I will ask James just to double check that, is that we are not at the moment a group of benefits that we would offset necessarily. Indeed, DWP's benefits, if somebody is on UC and something, can be a more automatic offsetting of an overpayment against a current payment. Again, I think that you will all see your constituents then have some odd letters about what they are actually getting paid from it. I do not know if James has anything else to say on that. There are a couple of key differences, so we do not recover official error, as the DWP does. Our statutory protection for hardship is in the act, and I do not believe that the DWP has an equivalent. The tools that are available to the DWP are varied. They will have administrative penalties and direct attachment of earnings. I am conscious of them. I think that, normally, from time to time, they would offset overpayments against benefits in receipt without giving the client the option, whereas the statutory protection for hardship would give our clients a discussion before that would happen. Our system is set up to foster a partnership and a collegiate approach to debt recovery. We are happy to talk about our system, but it is not the comparison that we would necessarily make. On that point, do you know what levels DWP has been asked to look towards debt recovery on behalf of Social Security Scotland? I had a look at your accounts and, from what I could see, its estimate of around £17,400 was detected with regard to internal fraud, but, as you have already said, no overpayments have ever been classified. I wonder whether DWP is doing what it looks like for Social Security Scotland, because it is transferring that to another organisation. Is that the benefit that I currently paid under the agency agreements? The agency agreements say that DWP will continue to do what they are doing at a UK national level. Any overpayments that have occurred in benefits that are currently administered by DWP would be end-to-end, so they would flow into those overpayments as well. I am right in saying, James, that we are not interjecting and asking a different approach and the agency agreements, the way they operate, do not really give us the ability to change a part of their process. That is absolutely correct. The key agreement with DWP was that it was a business-as-usual approach, so it is all administered under the UK legislation. All the powers that DWP has to recover for a debt are applied to those benefits under an agency agreement. Again, page 57 shows the total error on benefits administered under an agency agreement of £7 million in 2020-21, so it will be recovered at a similar rate to the rest of the UK. Going forward, it would be helpful if we had certain data around a number of cases specifically to Social Security Scotland, especially with transfer of PIP and things like that, where that might be more of a live issue. I wanted to ask some questions with regard to staffing and recruitment. Following our meeting and some useful conversations that we had in Dundee, when the workforce strategy was likely to be finalised. I think that we are working towards a target of next summer, I think that I am right in saying. There are some references to long-term and short-term workforce strategy, and I think that just to clarify, is it the longer-term strategy that you are asking about? I mean, in terms of workforce planning, we have quite, I believe, a sophisticated workforce planning arrangement within the organisation where what we are trying to do is to work with the service design that comes in, work with our analysts around about the expected volumes that are likely to appear around about benefits, as you will understand if benefits are slightly tweaked in places that can impact on the volume coming in. We have invested quite a lot in a team that is able to do some of that workforce planning about the more immediate aspects of it. The longer-term workforce planning, I think, was a point that came through the Audit Scotland report in particular as well. Some of that really hinges on the more longer-term benefits, so I come back to the point in terms of how we work with programme. It is difficult for us to predict what we will need in terms of a longer workforce planning until we are absolutely clear on what service design looks like and how those things plan out as well. I think that is why that is a slightly longer-term timetable for that. However, I stress that that does not mean that there is no workforce planning within the organisation. I do not think that that is what Audit Scotland is saying in the report that it is just asking for when that starts to look into the longer term. With regard to staffing requirements, why do you think that it has increased so much since the programme's business case was put forward, which was published in February 2020? Given that those key policy decisions for in-house assessment local delivery and plans around Scottish child payment, for example, had already been made at that point, given the announcements that we have seen by the First Minister recently, do you think that the organisation is going to grow beyond the £3,500 that is currently envisaged? I will take the first point first. I would say that I have not, in terms of the programme business case updated in 2020. The quick answer to that was that it simply was not updated for the programme business case. I would go back more to the 2017 projections as to where that figure came from. All the programme business case was doing was reiterating the 2017 figure, rather than a figure that had taken into account some of those changes. From the 2017 figure onwards, again, I always emphasised that it was an in-excess figure. It was a figure that we were comfortable with being at least a number of people that we needed. However, we were also quite clear that lots of decisions had yet to be made, which would affect those variables. Some of you have pointed out that it is significant, such as in-housing of clinical services. That is something that has not been done at the time as well. A service design for the more complicated disability benefits had not come through at the time. There are also a series of smaller design decisions, if you like, that can flow through the system. The duty on the organisation to collect more information to assist with appeals, for example, came through later in the process, so those tend to come through as well. The figure was also based on some earlier assumptions around how we would operate shared services with the Scottish Government, and, in reality, what has happened is that we have absorbed more of those functions internally than elsewhere, including, significantly, the chief digital office, which transferred to us in April last year, bringing in some significant numbers as well. For me personally, the programme business case is not the point that I would go back to. It is the outline business case for the organisation, which is where the number came from. I am sorry for talking about the second part of your question. It was specifically about what size you expect the organisation to be from the initial estimates to the £3,500 that we now see. We have always talked about steady state, and, as I said in the opening statement, we are a long way from steady state. As DWP does, it will peak and spike depending on what is going on and depending on how we launch benefits as well. The final determiner will essentially be the balance between technology and people. That is where the agile design comes into this as well. If some things are done technologically, that might push our costs into contracts with IT. If those are not done and they are done with people, it will push costs into there. It is one of the reasons that we are slightly reluctant to continually push figures out, because it is an agile development and our staffing requirements are in a way a consequence of how that agile looks like. That is helpful. Finally, on staffing from me, what is the organisation strategy with regard to the skillset? We again touched on that in our conversations, but the 400 advisers, for example, are now looking to recruit for hubs across the country. What is the workforce challenge in recruiting them? Have you already discovered that? One of the concerns that was expressed was the potential destabilisation of other services if we see individuals coming into Social Security Scotland who are very much working in the front line somewhere else at this moment in time. Specifically around Dundee, that was maybe something given the recruitment pool that you have already been drawing on, and that was some of the conversations that we had. I wondered in terms of that specialist skillset strategy, where you are with that and individuals being identified. There are probably two slightly different specific elements in there as well, but local delivery whilst it is a really skilled and experienced group of people that we are bringing in is not as highly specialised as some of the clinical appointments that you are probably talking about as well. Local delivery has not generally been a problem in terms of recruitment. You are right that we have taken people from a variety of different areas, whether that is third sector, whether in some cases it is other Government departments or other services, but at a local delivery level that has not been a particular issue. Just on the clinical, we are obviously developing our clinical approach based on part of how the initial team staffing up child disability payment has progressed as well. That is probably the area where the highest level of risk is at work. Are we potentially pooling people who may be working in the NHS, for example, at the moment, who may want to come in and work with us? It is very early days for us in terms of having any intelligence around that. Yes, we probably are getting some people from the NHS, but some early indications are that we are possibly extending their working life rather than necessarily drawing them at a different point. We are also taking people from other areas as well. Our strategy will develop in terms of clinical approaches as we go there as well. All the specialist pockets as well will have strategies skewed towards it. Ultimately, our strategy, aside from some very specialist things such as clinical, has to be a combination of both recruiting in the market and developing our own talent as well. For example, on accountancy, on James's side, we have a throughput in terms of training accountants. We have good relationships with local colleges around about HR practitioners, for example. We are not just going into the market and taking people who are fully qualified and trained. We absolutely see ourselves as part of that pipeline. Dundee is a good place where we are working both with the local colleges and the universities as well. We see a responsibility of developing the pipeline, not just of taking people from the market. Thank you very much indeed for bringing in Jeremy Balfour. I am just conscious of the time that I am good to run the session and delay the minister slightly, but if we could have quick questions and answers, please. Jeremy Balfour, followed by Pam Duncan-Glancy. Thank you, convener. I will follow up on that final point. Obviously, all of Scotland, in my reports, I was particularly concerned about recruiting people with clinical experience, and obviously, with the pandemic, that has made it worse. Are you looking at different opportunities for working part-time, even working on an agency basis that you might do one day a week, but continue being a nurse other time or OT? Is that a one-model fit all? I think that we will look at all of those opportunities. Obviously, we have the adult disability committee next year. We have seen the draft regulations. It will be a political decision made by the Parliament whether those are passed or whether they are awarded. If the Parliament decided that we wanted to transfer everybody across as is, but then we wanted to increase mobility from 20 to 50 metres, and that came in next year, would you have the capacity as an agency to deliver that decision, or would you need more staff in, and at what point do you need that decision made at a parliamentary level? What I am really looking for is that if the regulations are not just approved but are ordered to give more people the opportunity to apply, can you deliver that? If you cannot, when do you need that decision made so that you can bring in more staff? I do not have a straightforward answer. We work with our programme colleagues on that. If significant changes were made to the policy at the point of transfer, that would have a major impact on the resources that we require. That is probably a short answer to it. I am happy to take it away and write back if that is of help. I think that it would be really helpful if we could get some kind of indications around those questions, inviting for us to have a look at them. Just that, it would have a significant impact on the staffing implications. That would be helpful, because obviously eligibility at ADP in particular is going to be an area that we are going to be looking to touch on. It is going to be the chunkier end of the work that is coming through next year, I suppose. Pam Duncan-Glancy, please. Thank you for that, and thank you for your answer to the previous question. That is really helpful. I look forward to seeing the description that you make back to us. Just very briefly, how are you ensuring that the ethos of eligibility will change from the current system of personal independence payment to the new system of adult disability payment? What are you doing with your workforce to make sure that it is a different type of process? I know that we are pushing from time, but can you just maybe clarify what you mean by how we will work with people? Mainly how you will work with people. We have heard a lot about eligibility and adequacy of payments that will come further down the line. That would be a whole other session, I am sure. In the meantime, how are you making sure that the process, through application or transfer and in particular around the child disability payment, the adult disability payment, when that happens, is better than what it currently is with the DWP? In the meantime, some of that has worked up until now in terms of the benefits that we are currently delivering. How do we recruit people, how do we induct people? Similar conversations were had three years ago about if we were to take people in from DWP, how would we make sure that we had a different culture? Some of our answers remain valid. It is the skills we looked for, it is the experience that we are pulling in and it is fundamentally the attitude. So how do we recruit people into it, how do we induct people into the organisation? It probably comes back to the charter point as well as to why I think it is so important that our staff views are represented in that charter as well because you cannot have the system operating without one or the other. I think that we have some experience and some learning from how we have currently grown the organisation, but it is getting the right people, making sure that they are trained, making sure that they are getting that experience as well. It is probably the shortest answer that I could give on it. Miles, did you have a question in the final section? Yes, thank you convener. It was just with regard to spend, with regard to budgets, and probably the most important stuff, budgets to be honest. I just wondered in terms of what view you maybe had with regard to the variance that we have seen between budgets and actual spend to date. For the year that this set of annual report and accounts relates to, again I would come right back to it, it was a disrupted year through Covid, so I think a number of the variances in there are directly related to, A, some re-planning on the programme, so actually some benefit launch is shifting. Clearly when the budget was set, we had a different programme in mind, so as a result they would knock on as well. That goes likewise for capital, so as you know it was great to see your nagnus husband's house, but it's not quite there yet. In a non-Covid world we would have expected to have some of that capital expenditure gone and done and completed. So there has been absolutely a knock on from it. As you know from the budget, the vast majority of it is staffing, so if we're reprogramming when a benefit launches, inevitably that changes when we would try to bring people in and that change then creates an underspend in it. So I think it's an unusual year. Clearly how we monitor that will continue to go forward, but as long as there are huge variances in what volume might look like, what benefit launches might look like, I think that it's an implication of that. Do you think that that will have an impact on future forecasting then? Off the top of my head, I think that you are currently around 10 per cent cost to delivery, I think DWP 6.4 per cent. Do you see that increasing as is currently laid out in to-date costs? So when we stick by the numbers that we put in our corporate plan, which as you said does sort of say that it's not a competition but that benchmark of what it takes to run a benefit system around about the 6 per cent is where we'd want to head at the moment as I mentioned earlier, we're doing benefits which generally require a one-off application and a one-off look at that application and a one-off appeal as you get more into the recurring benefits that you're managing a case road rather than doing all the front-end work. How that bumps moves out in part comes back to the question about transfer of cases. So we're just starting to get some evidence about transferring the child disability payments. So how long that bump goes on effectively is how long we're paying DWP to still do something versus also doing it ourselves. But absolutely the graph that's in our corporate plan about saying our target is to be down there is still correct. Pam Duncan Glancy, please. Thank you, convener. How long do you expect to be spending money on the agency agreements and do you believe that the spend that you're using for agency agreements if you were delivering those benefits through Social Security Scotland directly, would it be a like for like comparison or would you be able to deliver it slightly more cheaply in terms of administrative costs or would it be more expensive? In the interest of time, there's probably a very long complicated answer to that. One of the ways of looking at that, if you did the straightforward math of how much we're paying DWP, it probably equates to about another two and a half thousand people, for example, but it's not as straightforward as that. DWP are more mature in terms of their technology and their processes. How long will we need to pay them as long as they're doing cases for us is a short answer. The majority, once we've got adult disability embedded and transferred across, that's when the significant chunk of that will come across. We do have arrangements for challenging the agency agreement costs, so it is not a straightforward process of they send us an invoice and we simply pay it. James is part of a group that challenges those costs and how they've been arrived at. Indeed, in reference to the previous question, we do that changes as well, so some of the underspend can come because the estimate of the agency agreement can vary through the course of the year. Again, if there's a fuller explanation around how agency agreements operate, I'm happy to commit that in writing. Thank you very much. As we're still within the window of revised timings that I'd suggested to the minister for the next section, I'll ask one final question. At the session that we had in Dundee, you had suggested about the feeling of the organisation in terms of the speed of scaling up, speed of roll-out of benefits. It would be useful for that suggestion that was made in that informal session to be put on the record for my benefit, please. Do you feel that you are moving at pace in terms of scaling up? Are you comfortable with that pace? Do you think that you could be going faster in terms of rolling out new social security benefits and taking on responsibility for existing? I'll try and remember the answer that I gave you in Dundee. From an organisational perspective, that feels fast and furious. 11 benefits in just over three years effectively is almost dropping a new benefit every quarter. Some of the stuff that you see in our annual report and accounts in Audit Scotland referencing guidance, for example, some of the points are being how you continually make sure that your staff have the absolute up-to-date guidance, know about referrals, know about advocacy, and some of those are a consequence of that pace that we're going at. There is one programme plan, so I'm loath to say that we could go a bit faster or the programme could go a bit faster. There is a joint plan of delivery, but from the agency's perspective, it does feel fast and furious. Do you feel that you have the support in order to meet that fast and furious timetable of roll-out? Absolutely. There is always a balance between paying money to people who are entitled to it versus the organisation saying that we're ready to do that. Inevitably, there are always some things that we would like to have in the organisation before we do that, but we're fully involved in those decisions and I absolutely agree that getting forward with the payments is the absolutely most important thing to do. That might be back to some of the previous questions, meaning that we're doing something slightly more manually than we would ideally like to do. We would like a system to do check something here, but that's an appropriate compromise for us to make sure that we're paying people in Scotland. Most importantly, do you feel that you're getting it right for the clients at the pace that you're going at? I don't want to be complacent on that. Back to the client survey. We've been driven by the client survey. I think that some of those responses are really positive. From surveying a group of clients, that's a phenomenally positive response on balance, but that's not to be complacent, as members have asked about those who are feeling slightly less positive about it. It's always that balance. We're broadly there, but we want to make sure that we're still a learning organisation. How we take the learning from the charter, how we take the learning from clients and make sure that we've got the space and stability to implement some of those changes whilst benefits continue to come down the track will always be a challenge, but it makes those jobs particularly exciting and challenging at the moment. Thank you very much indeed to you all for coming in and giving us your experiences and putting your experiences over the last few years on the record. I would greatly appreciate your time. As I said at the outset, I'm looking forward to having a regular and productive relationship with you all and looking forward to that progressing. Thank you very much indeed on behalf of the committee for your time again this morning. We'll now suspend briefly to allow for the changeover of witnesses. Thank you very much indeed. The committee will now take evidence on the best start grants and Scottish child payment miscellaneous amendments regulation 2021. I welcome again to the committee Ben Macpherson, the Minister for Social Security and Local Government. Online, the minister is joined by Pauline Torley, the Scottish child payment policy manager and Karen Clyde, the solicitor for the Scottish Government. I'd like to invite the minister, please, to make an opening statement. Thank you and good morning, convener. Good morning, members. Those regulations before us will make sure that the Scottish child payment and best start grant regulations align with our original policy intent of getting payments to the person responsible for the child. Best start grant is aimed at giving children the best start in life, offering financial support to eligible families at key points in a child's early years. Scottish child payment is also the most ambitious child poverty reduction measure in the UK. It supports families on qualifying benefits that have children under six, extending to under 16 by the end of 2022, all going to plan in terms of getting the data required from the DWP. The Scottish child payment is already supporting 106,000 children with payments worth £40 every four weeks, increasing to £80 in April next year, as was announced by the First Minister earlier this week. Convener, the first tier tribunal highlighted that, in a very small number of cases, the Scottish child payment regulations for resolving competing cases did not award the person with the child responsibility—sorry, rather—did not award the person with responsibility for the child. A related issue arose with best start grant, where an award was made to someone receiving the child element of universal credit, but someone else was actually caring for the child. Therefore, without those amendments in the regulations before the committee today, we will not always be able to pay the person who is actually responsible for the child. Ordinarily, one person would receive the child responsibility benefit, and the use of top-up powers would work to meet the policy intent. Recently, it has become clear that that does not always happen in practice, and we are seeking to rectify that. Although the numbers affected are likely to be very low, we are seeking to make the changes in the regulations before us because it is the right thing to do. Draft regulations were referred to the Scottish Commission on Social Security in September, and considering their workload, I was very grateful to receive their scrutiny report in October. We have accepted all recommendations, and our response was laid in Parliament on 12 November. David Wallace, chief executive of Social Security Scotland, also provided an update to SCOS outlining how the agency responded to the problem of competing claims in advance of the regulations being laid. That clarified how the agency will support the regulations through guidance. The agency will publish updated guidance to coincide with the regulations coming into force, and I remain extremely grateful to the Scottish Commission on Social Security for its scrutiny and recommendations. I also welcome this opportunity to assist the committee in its considerations of the regulations before us, and I look forward to any questions that members may have. Thank you very much, minister. That is very helpful. If any colleagues would wish to come in at this stage, please indicate, as others have already done so. I would like to start with Marie McNair, followed by Pam Duncan-Glancy, please. Thank you, chair. My question is on the actual theme, too. Thanks very much, minister. Are you concerned that the approach that you want to take will undermine the shared care of children? We encourage parents, first of all, with shared care, to make the decision as to who makes a claim. The numbers that are affected by the changes to the rules are likely to be very minimal, as I stated in the opening statement there. We do not anticipate that this change will deter parents from shared care. We shared the draft regulations with our stakeholder group and no feedback was received in terms of the outcome. I do not believe that it will disincentify shared care. Pam Duncan-Glancy, please, followed by Miles Briggs. Thank you, convener, and good morning, minister. Thanks for joining us again. My first question is on the issue of the data. Could you give the committee an update on the data coming from the DWP in terms of the wider roll-out, if that is possible, either this morning or in writing? It would be good to hear about that. Specifically, on the reason in the first place to go on a first-come-first-served basis for the payments, I would be keen to know a little bit about that. I will take the second question first, if that is okay. In terms of why it was not considered an acceptable backstop provision, but just to give the wider context. In the original Scottish child payment rules, it states that a second applicant for Scottish child payment who is not higher up the hierarchy of entitlement than a previous applicant will have their application rejected. In the effect of creating a first-come-first-served rule for two applicants with the same qualifying criteria—in effect, it creates a first-come-first rule for two applicants with the same qualifying criteria. However, it was not anticipated that two different people could both satisfy the top tier qualifying criteria, so that was not anticipated. That is why we needed to amend the regulations and why we have brought them before us today. I should say that the reason we did not anticipate the situation and the one that anticipated the situation could happen through the process of the original regulations was because it should not be possible for more than one individual to be in receipt of the qualifying benefit with the associated child element for the same child. Where universal credit is top of the hierarchy, only one person should get the child element and one person would get child benefit. We expected that any change in circumstances were a responsibility for the child moved, that any associated benefits would move with the child. However, it has now become clear that that is not always happening, and that is in the DWP reserved system. We are making the amendments today in response to considerations in the reserved system in terms of the reserved benefits that create the entitlement to the devolved benefits in question, so that is just to give context. I have had a recent bilateral with Chloe Smith on the issue of the data for the second phase of the roll-out of Scottish child payment, and both officials from the Scottish Government and the DWP continue to be engaged in conversations around securing that data for the November 2022 timescale that we are working towards and to make sure that we progress in the fashion that is required in order to deliver to meet that timescale. In terms of the data, because the data sharing brought about the delay to the initial roll-out of the Scottish child payment, are you confident that there is not going to be a further delay, that the data coming from the UK Government, the DWP, will come in time this time round? I can certainly emphasise that, from a Scottish Government position, we are making it very clear to the DWP when we require the data and how we require it in order to meet that deadline. I do not want to say anything more at this stage, convener, as officials are engaged in good faith on this matter, but I will certainly update the committee in due course, as appropriate. That is very helpful. Thank you, convener. Good morning, minister. Welcome to the committee again. I wanted to ask a few questions with regard to the shared care, because looking at the regulation, it seems very clunky and does not take into account separated parents, for example, who might take equal sharing, caring for a child or their children. I just wondered whether or not ministers have looked at some solutions to that 50-50 split, for example, in providing that benefit. I thank Miles Briggs for that important question. The situation where two parents should be in receipt of a qualifying benefit for the same child should not be possible in terms of the qualifying benefit. If the situation arises where both parents have an exact 50-50 split of care and both are in receipt of a qualifying benefit, we would trust that the process of applying for the qualifying benefit would provide clarity by awarding the child element to the parent responsible for the child and where that fails for any reason and triggers a competing claim for Scottish child payment. The rules that allow Scottish ministers to consider the circumstances of the child will apply. The evidence that will be considered by Scottish ministers in determining awards in those cases will be set out in the published guidance, so the guidance will be important in terms of those questions. That is helpful. Reading into that, has any work been done with regard to how that potentially can disincentivise people, separated parents specifically, to take a shared care approach? As I set out to Pam Duncan Glancy, we continue to encourage parents with shared care to make the decision as to who makes a claim. We shared the draft regulations with our stakeholder group and no feedback was received suggesting that outcome. Beyond that group, was there any other assessment or review taking place? I think that that has opened up an area where it is important that more work takes place to see whether or not the regulations can sometimes be changed to fit the real world that we live in. I wondered what additional work beyond the regulations that the Government intends to do on that. I will bring Pauline in in a moment on that, if I may convener. Of course, the Scottish Government considers to evaluate and consider how all our benefits are performing and what revisals we may need to make to regulations to make sure that they consider the different situations of different families and different circumstances. Indeed, the fact that we have brought those regulations before the committee today is evidence of that continued work to improve the benefits that we provide. Pauline, I do not know if you want to say any more about engagement or any other points that Mr Briggs has raised. The Scottish Government is committed to learning about our benefits work in order to learn lessons from the future. We utilise a programme, long-going evaluation, delivered by analysts and researchers in conjunction with external expertise. We are currently conducting an interim evaluation of Scottish child payment, which will focus on the impact on the priority groups outlined in the tackling child poverty delivery plan. We should have access to immersion findings by the end of this year and the final report early in 2022. As we move on to the regulations for phase 2, we will roll in Scottish child payment out to under-16s. We are currently engaging with our stakeholders and the third sector to have a look at the current regulations, how they are working and what we intend to do in terms of amendment regulations, and taking on board any feedback as to how Scottish child payment is working in practice. Following that answer and those regulations, would it be fair to say that we are likely to see a future change quite quickly then, potentially being brought to committee? It is certainly not the position we envisage as things stand, as has been set out in my opening statement and my previous answers. We are making those changes with regard to issues that have arisen as a result of the entitlement to reserve benefits and the effect that that has on our devolved benefits. We are making changes in order to make sure that the person with responsibility for the child receives the devolved benefit, but we will continue to keep those regulations. As we do all our regulations and our benefits under a continuous review to seek to make improvement where appropriate and where possible. First, on a procedural one, I think that we have touched on this previously, in regard to the time that Scottish get to respond. Again, they have pointed out in the report that it was a restricted time that we did get it done. Are you looking forward at giving them a longer period of time to be able to consider the recommendation? As a committee and as a parliament, we can take that into account. Mr Balfour raised an important point. I have discussed the issues and the amount of consideration that SCOSS has had to give to different sets of regulations over the recent period. We are very mindful of that. I have spoken previously at committee about the extra resourcing that we are providing to SCOSS in the period ahead. Certainly, the ambition is to give SCOSS adequate time to evaluate as appropriate and as required. We, of course, have faced a number of developments in recent months that have required evaluation and engagement from SCOSS that were not anticipated. For example, the regulations around those coming to the UK from Afghanistan required consideration quickly and that was unexpected previously. Is the ambition to give SCOSS to try to reduce the demand on SCOSS in the period ahead? Yes. Are we very grateful to SCOSS's engagement and work over the past months? Absolutely. Will we continue to work constructively with SCOSS to make sure that they have the resource that they require? Yes, we are. That is good to hear. The second question that you might want to take away, minister, while I announce the date. It just occurred to me to listen to you. One of the issues that we had when we were putting through carers allowance was that there may well be two people caring for a parent or for a child, but it is again the same stage that it first comes, first gets. Has there been any looking at that in the same light as this, that you may end up with two people who are actually offering the same care but only one person is getting the benefit because they applied before the other one? Has there been any evidence taken when that has been an issue? Is it something that you and your officials have been looking at in any context at all? I appreciate that it is a bit left field, so I am happy if you would rather take it away and respond in writing. If I may, of course, the wider considerations within Mr Balfour's question, which also relates to the regulations before us today, are around the qualifying benefit, because, of course, carers allowance, the Scottish Government delivers DWP under agency agreement continues to deliver carers allowance and also the supplement and this year the additional payment. Those are considerations around the qualifying benefit. The points that Mr Balfour raised are pertinent and important with regard to the development of Scottish carers assistance in the period ahead, and we are going to be publishing our consultation on that shortly. Those are absolutely points of consideration. If I may take that away rather than necessarily, I am happy to respond with any further points of information or interest above what I have said just now, but of course those will be considerations in the period ahead as we look at the development of Scottish carers assistance. Thank you very much. If there are no further questions, we will move to agenda item four, which is the formal debate on the motion. I remind the committee that only... Sorry, Pam. Thank you, convener. Forgive me. I had hoped to ask a question about the use of discretion if there is time. My colleague Pauline McNeill said in the last committee session that there needs to be quite a bit of scrutiny around the shared care and to understand that and that you need, therefore, comprehensive guidance. Scots has highlighted that there could be potential human rights issues if the level of discretion is increased. Can you set out why you have left the detail on the types of circumstances to be taken into account to Social Security Scotland and have you given them any direction about what those guidance would include? Thank you for that. We will closely monitor the use of discretion in competing claims, as you would expect. There are currently processes and a number of meetings in place between agency and policy officials to discuss cases that are live at the moment. Those existing provisions between the agency and policy officials will continue. The guidance will be published to coincide with the amending regulations coming into force on 23 December. We can consider that guidance thereafter, if that is appropriate or helpful, but the points around discretion need to be considered carefully with regard to the development of that guidance. Officials will be actively involved in engagement with the agency to make sure that guidance is appropriate for the needs that are required. I do not know whether you want to comment any more on Pam Duncan Glancy's question. I would like to add that in terms of putting discretion in the guidance and the circumstances in which ministers should consider who would be entitled to the payment. It allows us to not be prescriptive with the regulations, which means that we should be faced with a heating decree that does not quite fit at the site of rules. Then we will be able to consider that in the guidance and update the guidance accordingly, but it just makes it easier for the different circumstances to be considered. The final question is from Maureen MacNeir, please. Just come back to the guidance. Is there any consultation on the content of the guidance? Did you say that it will be published on 23 December? The guidance will be published to coincide with the amending regulations coming into force on 23 December. Organisations that are being consulted, we intend to consult with the five family payments reference group, which includes the third sector NHS and local government representation and the child poverty action group CPEG. We will now move to the formal debate on the motion. I remind colleagues that only members and the minister may take part in the formal debate. I invite the minister to move the motion. S6M-02177, that the Social Justice and Social Security Committee recommends that the best start grants and Scottish child payment, miscellaneous amendments regulations 2021, be approved. In which case I would put the question on the motion. The question is that motion S6M-02177, in the name of Bennett McPherson, be approved. Are we all agreed? We are agreed. Thank you very much. The motion is therefore approved. I would like to thank the minister and the officials for your time this morning. It is greatly appreciated. That concludes the public part of this morning's meeting. I invite the committee to agree that the clerks and I will produce a short factual report of the committee's decision and arrange to have it published. Are we content? Thank you again minister for your time this morning, as well as your colleagues who have joined us online. Thank you to Karen and to Pauline for your time this morning. That concludes the public part of this morning's meeting. Our next meeting is on 9 December. We will be taking evidence on the third sector's recovery. I suspend this meeting and move to private session.