 Hefyd, morhaiddo, unrhyw gwaffydd gwaith o ddau'r mai 36 yn gyfryd o ddau social gyflosiwr, gyfrifocir a'r ddau social iawn. Rwyf ni'n mwyaf hwnnw i ddweud eich cyflym ei ddweud eich gwellidau o ddau anfodol aot 5 yn cyf Robbie Lawless. Rhaid? That's great. Jeremy Balfour. Rwyf ni'n dda'n cael ei lwyser. Rwyf ni'n dda'n cael ei ddweud eich ddweud o ddweud eich ddweud eich ddweud eich Felly mae'n gwych yn i'r partyscol o hollion cyhoedd. Rwy'n gwneud bod chi bod hi oedd iawn ar y cyfnodau gyda'n ei ddyiantlyn eu cyfnod. Rwy'n gwneud i'w cael ei gwynedd, Jeremy. Gwyddo, mae'n gwych bod hi'n gydag datblygu ei ddy pairedd. Rydw i'n gwedd i gyda'r cyffinidau qui tyw pwysig i'u gwych yn g liquor. Rwy'n gwych ar y lleiddau, gydag amwych gael'i cwestiynau oherwydd i'r cyfan y cwestiynau, Absoluto, rydym yn ddysgust i ddweud. Rwy'n cael ei ddweud yn bwysigol, ond rai cyfnodau ysgrifesgol ysgrifesgol yn y cyfnodau i 2023 i 2024, yn gweithio gyda'r Cymysgol ysgrifesgol, ac rwy'n meddwl i'r prifesgol Professor Graham Roy, Professor David Alff a Michael Davidson, yn ysgrifesgol ysgrifesgol i gydagol i gynhyrchu bwysigol. Rwy'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r acer塊rau'r cyfnodau. A llwg i'ch nhw'n ffordd o'r ystafell drillol a'r erbyn hyn. Mae'n ffordd o ysgriffa'n athegon nhw, rychwp instruct y mynd i chi'n raiесu'n arbenigawdodau. A oesciwch chi'n dd resentment i mixion o'r chlas cymdeithaswg a chytwbl o ddim yn dweud, ac i'r ddysgriffa'n ddysgriffa'n dweud ar gyfer weithfodol o'r ddifnwg ddechigoch o 128 o'r cyfridwyr. Before we move to questions, I'll invite Graeme Roy to make some opening remarks. Good morning, convener, and good morning, committee members. Thank you very much for the opportunity to come along and give you some evidence on our forecast that we published last Thursday. Our report came at a time of, when the near-time outlook for the Scottish and UK economies has weakened, the purchasing power of household incomes is anticipated to fall by the largest amount since Scottish records began in 1998. Inflation should peak at around about 11 per cent by the end of this year, and that will outstrip earnings growth across the economy. High inflation and the recession will affect everyone, but there will be particular pressures on lower-income households in part because they spend a larger share of income on essentials, such as energy and food. Higher inflation also feeds through into our forecasts of social security spending, as a majority of payments are increased each year by inflation. The rate being applied in April 2023 is 10.1 per cent, and the level of CPI from September 2022 misaccounts for over £400 million of the increase in our forecast for spending for 2023-2024. We forecast that total social security spending will be £5.2 billion in 2023-2024, rising to £7.3 billion in 2027-2028. The increase in expenditure comes from more people receiving payments and an average people receiving higher payments over time. The overall difference between the funding that the Scottish Government receives for social security from the UK Government and spending is estimated at £776 million in 2023-2024, growing to £1.4 billion in 2027-2028. There are uncertainties around those forecasts, which I am sure we will pick up in the evidence session when we come to it. However, one of the main drivers of the difference is the Scottish child payment, with forecast spending of £442 million in 2023-2024. This is a major part of the Scottish Government's tackling child poverty delivery plan, but as a new benefit, there is no associated funding from the UK Government. There are also changes to disability benefits, with which gradual increased spending over the forecast horizon is most significant. The most significant is adult disability payment, where we estimate that spending will exceed the equivalent funding by £208 million in 2023-2024, rising to £659 million in 2027-2028. As I said, additional spending is more uncertain in other parts of our social security forecasts, as it is based on our assumptions and judgments of the impact of Scottish Government reforms. Finally, in order to reduce the uncertainty in our forecast, it is important for us to receive timely and detailed data on disability benefits in Scotland, and I wrote to you last week to provide you with an update on our access to this data. Thank you very much. I will move straight to questions for members, and I will bring in Paul MacLennan to kick us off. Thank you, convener, and good morning panel. It does not seem that long since we heard you in front of us the last time, and still the same issues. I think that you have touched on a couple of issues right at the start. One was talking about the cost of uprating, which is included in the block grant adjustment. To what extent does inflation create a risk to the Scottish budget? The second question is about the current level of uncertainty in inflation forecasts. You talked about the rate being 11 per cent, and the impact on those and more incomes. I wonder if you can say a little bit more in particular about food inflation. Food inflation has obviously been predicted to be higher and has been higher, so I wonder if you can touch on that aspect as well. I will probably just come to yourself first of all. That is great. I will give you a high-level answer, and I will bring in my colleague as well to pick that up. You are right. One of the big differences in this time around and perhaps in the previous years in doing the forecast is the effects of inflation, and in particular how that feeds through to the uprating of social security payments. In our report, figure 5.1 shows the increase of £3.6 billion, of which about £1.2 billion is coming through from inflation. That has added to a significant amount of the additional expenditure that we think will happen in the years ahead. In terms of the risk to the Scottish budget, because of the way that the fiscal framework works, the benefits—the so secure benefits that have the equivalent benefit in the rest of the UK—are also being uprated by an equivalent amount. Via the block grant adjustment, that feeds through to the Scottish budget. On that basis, there is no risk in the sense that the significant uplifting that is happening has an equivalent BGA. There are two caveats to that, which are worth highlighting. First, inflation is not just having an impact on the social security element of the budget, but it is also having an impact on the broader Scottish budget more generally. That is probably shown most starkly if you look at the totality of spend. We think that it is going up. It will go up by about £1.7 billion next year, but in total that is only about £279 million once you account for inflation. The amount of capacity elsewhere in the budget to potentially cope with additional changes in social security is being squeezed, so that is a potential risk that exists there. The final part is that the elements of the social security payments that do not have an equivalent BGA—things such as Scottish child payment in the future, things such as additional changes that the Scottish Government has made to existing benefits that do not have an equivalent part of the BGA—is not factored into the forecast. I think that we have a chart on figure 5.10 that shows by the end of the forecast about £185 million that is equivalent in that context. That is the broad answer to your first part. Will you hand over to David to add anything additional to that and pick up that question that you have had about food inflation, if that is okay? Let me make a few points in addition to the ones that Graham made. Just to get that in context, the operating for inflation in 2023-24 only accounts for £28 million of the £776 million estimate of the funding gap, so the proportion of the funding gap that is accounted for by the operating for inflation is quite small for next year. For £27.28, the corresponding figures are that out of a total funding gap of £1.4 billion, the operating only accounts for £185 million of that funding gap. The amount of the funding gap that is attributable to operating is actually very small, both next year but also through into £27.28. A useful figure that you might want to bear in mind in thinking about this is that for every additional 1% increase in inflation, that has just over £10 million to the funding gap in the year in which that happens, but also in every subsequent year after that, because an important aspect of operating for inflation is that it is a persistent effect once you operate the level of benefit that higher benefit applies forever more after that. We haven't broken out the amount of the operating that is attributable specifically to food. I don't know, Michael, do you have any figure for that? Are you right that it's a very serious increase? Yes, I suppose that if it's not broken down, I suppose that it's anecdotal. We've seen various forecasts and various estimates come through, saying that it's probably nearer 15% rather than 11%. Another essential is probably nearer 20% rather than 11%. I suppose that it's diving a little bit deeper into impact in the particular lower page when they're having to spend a more proportionate amount on food in the end of the year, and that's a real thing that we need to be aware of in terms of what we're looking at. The important part here is that there are different inflation rates for different people in the population, and it depends very much on what prices are going up and what proportion of the budget that accounts for for those people, and in this case because inflation is largely driven by energy prices and that's having a knock on effect on food prices as well. Those are very high proportions of the budgets of poorer people, so that's why it really, really matters for poor people, and their effective inflation rate is much higher than for the average. Is the fiscal commission looking at doing something more specific around that in the future because you mentioned it around proportionately it's a higher part of their income, but it is that something the commission could do a little bit more deeper dive into, for example, and say that there is that more specific impact that could be people on a lower decibel of income, because again, I think that really impacts on the work that we are looking at, and I know we're talking about anecdotal, but is there a more specific piece of work that the commission could do on that, or is it looking to do something on that? There are other bodies like the Institute for Physical Studies that produce studies of this, and we do cite some of their work in our reports, and we do try to highlight these distributional breakdowns of the effects in our reports, but because a lot of our stuff is quite a high aggregate level, it doesn't necessarily drive quite a lot of the forecasting we do, but wherever we think is relevant, we will try to bring the huts on. Graham, do you want to huts on that? I agree that it's a challenge in terms of the effects of inflation there, so a couple of points on that. One is that David is right, and you're right as well, about the different inflation effects that people face. There's also a bit about what's the proportion of that to people's income, so how much of it can you then adjust your behaviours because of that? If you have high earnings and high savings, you can flex your expenditures and behaviours much more easily than you can do if you don't have levels of income, so it is an issue. In terms of our forecasting, because we're looking at the macro picture, we tend not to go down to that level. It's actually one of the issues where there's a gap in UK statistics about different inflation rates across the country, so there's increasing work going on to look at different inflation rates across individual household types, but we don't have different inflation rates for different parts of the UK, so there isn't an inflation rate for Scotland published, and there isn't an inflation rate for the rest of the UK. One final thing in there, as well, is not only do we know that there are different price levels in inflation for households, but even within Scotland, so energy costs in rural areas are much higher than they are in other parts of the country, so it just adds to your complexity point that you're raising there. Thank you very much, Paul. We'll now move to questions from James Dornan, who's joining us online. Can I ask—I notice that the SFC has talked about the forecast for increasing applications for disability benefits. Are there similar trends in Scotland as it is in the rest of the UK? So, there's a couple of things. In terms of the recent increase that we've seen in trends towards people who are increasing applications, it was probably seen quite a lot recently about the significant increase in PIP applications in the whole of the UK. Broadly speaking, we're seeing similar trends in that context between Scotland and the rest of the UK, and you can see that there's quite helpful chart, figure 5.5, in our report, which shows you that that jump up in applications to PIP in Scotland. Broadly speaking, we're seeing that same increase in inflows over the time period, but perhaps maybe bringing David to maybe give you some work that we've been doing to try and think about what might be driving that? Yes, we've been thinking about the range of factors that might be driving that, and in our report, we identify essentially three sets of drivers. One driver is actually the cost of living crisis, and that operates in two ways. One is people having cost of living pressures will be much more likely to apply for whatever money might be available for them. That tends to increase the number of applications for any type of social security, but if they think that they're eligible for disability benefits, they will apply for them in cases where they might otherwise have done. The other effect of the cost of living crisis is that it can create mental health problems for people trying to work out on how to cope with that crisis. That will trigger a disability claim for mental health reasons. The cost of living itself will be one of the factors. Another factor driving that is the lengthening backlog in the NHS, so people who have a disability are waiting for treatment. Backlog in the NHS means they're not getting that treatment, and so a mild or medium condition can turn into a very serious condition and one that will entitle them to disability benefits. The third factor is just the long-term impact of the pandemic itself. Both through some of the effects of long Covid might be having effects, particularly on mental health again as a major component of disability benefit, but also through the other channels as well. We know from the work that we've done that about 40 per cent of people claiming disability benefits do so from mental health issues. Those mental health effects of both the cost of living crisis and the long-term impact of the pandemic are a serious component of what's driving up claims. Does that change the estimate of how much more ADP will cost compared to continuing with PIP? I'll go first on that. A couple of things that we have to do when we are thinking about our judgment in this context is, to what extent have the increases that we have seen in PIP across the UK? How much of that is additional demand, or how much of that is demand for people who are already eligible to take it up? Our assessment at the moment is that this is mostly new demand, so this is mostly things that, as David said, are linked to things such as the legacy effects of the pandemic. On that basis, the increase that we think will be coming through in the context and feeding ultimately through to ADP, because it will be mirrored at the UK, so it's a kind of proportionate in that context, there will be a BGA that will flow behind that, but that doesn't change our assessment that the changes that the Scottish Government is applying to do around adult disability benefit to make it a different system will unlock the potential increase in payments and eligibility from people who would already be eligible for that. We make a slight adjustment in the short term around our forecast, because we think that there is a fixed number of people who are doing that, but it doesn't really change our assessment that we think that there will be additionality of people claiming those adult disability payments in the future, even with a spike-up in the PIP that we have seen in recent months. The PIP increases new demand and the actual funding element is from the actual changes in the new system. Thank you very much, James. I will just bring Pam Duncan-Glancy in who has a brief supplementary. The brief supplementary, thank you, convener. Good morning. Thank you for answering questions so far and also for what you've shared in advance. I just want to pick up on two points you made there around mental health in the backlog in the NHS. Can you give a proportion of the increases accountable to a tribute tool to those two factors? Unfortunately we can't. We don't have enough data for a long enough period of time to be able to break that down. The other problem in trying to break it down is that for many people there might be multiple factors at work in driving what's happening here, so those are the three elements that I discussed. The increase in uptake might be because of both cost of living pressures as well as mental health issues and other problems. It's quite hard to disentangle those three facts and say exactly how many people are coming out of each. We just don't have the data yet to track down to that level of detail. Is it better to get the data or is it gathered? I think that we can do this for the stuff at DWP, so we can look at the DWP data because they have a very rich data source on that. We can look at that and track that. That gives us our baseline number of claimants and we can see how far that is going up. That's essentially what we're talking about here. We're not talking about the new people who are coming in because of the reforms that the Scottish Government has made. We're talking about essentially an increase to the baseline, so we can do some further analysis. I say that it could be difficult because there are many people for whom more than one factor will be in play here. There is supplementary data that will track as well, but not more on the social security payment side on things like labour market data. Particularly at the UK level, as long as we assume that there might not be a difference between Scotland and the UK in seeing this spike, we can track again in time to see whether there has been an increase in activity and then people saying what that reason for that increase in activity has been, whether that be for ill health or whether that be for early retirement, etc. Once we see changes in the labour market, we can get some more evidence in time to see whether or not we're seeing an increase in people saying that they've got ill health conditions, which we can then map across to see whether that is correlated with what we're seeing in the social security data. However, it is uncertain at this time. All we're seeing is the spike, understanding generally what that is and what's driving that is still uncertain at this stage. I appreciate that. Thank you Pam. Jeremy Balfour. Good morning, Pam. Thank you for coming along. This might be too early, but one of the forecasts that you made or your predecessor made was that there would be a higher uptake of ADP compared to PIP. I think that Scottish Government has kind of budgeted on that because the system is meant to be kinder, fairer, smoother. Is it too early to see, is that a trend that we're seeing that there are more uptakes in ADP compared to people who had been applying for PIP or DWP or is it too early for that trend to show out? In short, it's too early. Obviously, we've just had the pilot and then the initial roll-out and we'll get our first real cut of the data probably in the spring next year. We'll start to see then about broad trends in that, but even then it won't be robust enough for us to start to use into our forecasts. As we mentioned a couple of times there about the uncertainty, we're actually at this really tricky point in the forecasting period where we've got a completely new benefit approach to the benefit coming through the system, but until we actually start to get the data on take-up data and the type of people they're doing, what are the inflows coming into that, what are the age profiles, what are the reasons for the claimants, until we get a decent track of that, we won't really know whether those things that we think might happen have really come through. In short, it's too early, but hopefully we should get this in the next year or so. I was just about to ask roughly why we should be looking for it. Will we be able to do some analysis to say that, if we were still under DWP PIP scheme, we reckon that the X number would have got the award, but because it's ADP, either it's higher or lower than that, will you be able to do that, or is that going to be almost too difficult to dig down on? I'll go first on then to David and Michael. On the one hand, at a crude level, you can do that to an extent, in the sense of comparing the BGAs to how much you're spending on ADP and the approximate difference of two, we'll show you that, but what we really need is the quality of the data. That's exactly what you're talking about there. It all really depends on the quality of the data. Are we seeing differences in take-up by different types of condition, by age, or by gender? All of those things come down ultimately to the quality of the data, and that's why we've been pressing so much on having that robust data as soon as possible, because it lets us answer those questions and then it lets us start to change our forecast if we need to, depending on take-up and eligibility. It's just one thing to add to that, is that the other people involved in this process are the OBR, because they're forecasting the block grant adjustment for this, which, to some extent, is what would have happened had the Scottish Government not made the reforms. One thing that's happened over the last year is that we've managed to bring our forecast of that much closer to the OBR forecast. The problem is that their methodology is very different from the methodology and the data that we've got, so we haven't been able to exactly mimic what they're doing. In some ways, that's helpful. In some ways, it's helpful to have two different people using two different approaches to the same thing, so the fact that we're now narrowing that gap means that we are starting to get better and better at forecasting what that is. Essentially, as a counterfactual, what would have happened had we not had those reforms made. It is a relatively hypothetical number that we're trying to forecast here, but the fact that these two methodologies are starting to converge gives us some reason to think that we'll be able to do this better in the future. Thank you, convener. Can you touch on this? You mentioned about the funding gap previously, from being, I think, it was 881 that was forecast, and it's dropped slightly. I'm just wondering if there's any comment on what you want to touch on, was there any specific reason for that at all? There are a couple of things. When we come on to this, we have a discussion about what we mean by funding gap. In some ways, the phrase funding gap is not always entirely helpful because it creates the impression of a hole in a gap. None of this spending is ring-fenced by the BGAs. This is what the Government chooses to spend priority on across the entire suite of public spending and then look at the revenues coming in there. So when we come back to that, we will discuss it because I think it is really important to be clear about what we mean by funding gaps in that context, but also the uncertainty there. The difference between the BGAs and the amount of spending on that is narrowed by about £106 million in 2023-2024. The key reasons for that is the discussion that we've had about PIP and ADP, and the fact that some of that increase that we were thinking of in ADP is being captured by what's happening on PIP of the UK. There's an associated increase in the BGA relative to what we thought was going to happen because of the increases in PIP across the rest of the UK. Then there's a small modest thing around child disability payment, where we don't yet have data to have updated our forecast from last year, but the OBR has increased their forecast for child disability payment across the rest of the UK, so that leads through to a higher BGA, and that's the key reason why the gap between the two has decreased. Although we haven't updated our forecast because of those data issues, the work we've done suggests that, broadly, we think that the outcome data is in line with what we were forecasting there, so that's why we haven't revised or changed our forecast on CDP. Thank you. I'll move now to questions from Pam Duncan Glancy. My questions have largely been answered with the exception of one small question, thank you, convener. I notice in the data, and forgive me if I misread this, that there are assumptions that there will be no increase in winter heating payment or child winter heating allowance, and there'll be less spending on best art grants. Can you say anything about the assumptions that have led to that? In the pension age winter heating payment, is that the one that you mentioned? For those payments, it's primarily the winter heating payment that our assumptions around what the Scottish Government's policy is going to be on upgrading. The group of benefits where upgrading is applied is a statutory process for that, but then for the other benefits, it's more on a year-to-year basis. There have previously been decisions, so the dishes in this year, I think, for child winter heating assistance and for winter heating payment has been to apply upgrading in 23-24 when those payments are made, but then we assume that, following that, the policy will go back to not upgrading them in future years, so broadly for those benefits. For the winter heating payment, the overall expenditure that we forecast to stay level, because, roughly speaking, the number of people that we expect to receive it will stay constant, and then also the payment level once it's increased in 23-24, we keep it fixed for the rest of the rise. Obviously, if policy changes, then we'll factor that into future forecast, but that's our understanding of what the policy is at the moment for that benefit, and that applies also to child winter heating assistance as well. Just to check that you don't think that there will be an increase in child winter heating assistance applicants? Broadly speaking, I think that for the child winter heating assistance applicants, there could be some increases, but it very much lines up with our child disability payment forecast. Although that increases a bit towards the end of the horizon, I think that the increase there is more around the upgrading rather than the actual number of children getting it. Child disability payment, there is some increase in the case load, and for child winter heating assistance as well, but it's a fairly marginal increase, so that's why. We've rounded the expenditure there to £5 million. There probably are increases within that, but the rounding taking it to £5 million probably makes it look flat there. The reason I asked is just because it felt a little bit inconsistent with some of the information in the previous conversation about the increases in disability payments and then why that wouldn't therefore be seen driven through the child winter heating assistance. Also, the cost-of-living conversation that we had would appear to maybe consider that more people may become eligible for some of the winter heating payments as well as a result of that, but you're working on the assumption that that won't be the case. The winter heating payment is a combination of benefits and low-income benefits. Although in our economy forecast, we've got a slight increase in unemployment, a lot of the people who already have low incomes will already be eligible through their low-income benefits, rather than becoming unemployed. We think that that's quite a marginal effect. That's helpful. That's all I have on that theme. We've covered a lot of those questions, but I wanted to revert back to a point with regard to financial management. I just wondered where you think the Scottish Government is developing that. Graeme, you've hinted towards the use of the word gap in funding. Where do you think the Scottish Government is in trying to manage that going forward? It's not for me to comment on how the Scottish Government is managing that. We do the forecast and we set it out and then it's for the Government to manage. A couple of things, if I could say. The funding app is quite challenging because it creates the impression of a gap here. What the Government is doing is setting out a totality of a budget now of different elements of spending and then what it's doing on the revenue side, the balance between that and then making the choices in social security and public services and tax there more generally. What we do know is that on policies such as the Scottish child payment, which are new policies and which do not have an equivalent BGA, they have to be funded for either through taxation or through adjustments in public services in other areas. I think that the funding difference is about £450 million by the end of the forecast period. You then have all those other benefits that have a BGA to it. If you adopt a different approach and it's about doing a different system and that leads to higher take-up and higher average payments, then that will have to be paid for. That then comes back to the point about what does that mean in terms of the balance of tax and the balance of public services that are in there. I guess that the point to not answer your question that goes as far as I am prepared to go is to say that the Government then needs to essentially plan on that basis just that it would do with all our forecasts and say, well, this is what the independent assessment is of potential funding coming down the line, so then you have to plan for that. You have to think about your taxes, you have to think about your public spending in other areas and ultimately think about the outcomes that you are trying to achieve. That totality of all is a thing that is really important. That is helpful. It is an important issue to think about when you are talking about managing this. Is there a distinction between social security and other areas of Government spending? Or that social security is essentially a demand-led form of payment that once you have designed the policy, once you have designed the criteria and then Social Security Scotland implement those policies, once you have set the rates, the amount of money that you actually go out the door on this depends on the number of people who turn up and claim it. That is not something that you can then control. That is why it is really important to try to think ahead and understand, albeit if there are highly uncertain forecasts, what the potential implications will be for long-term funding on social security, because it is not something that you can manage in the same way as health or education spending. That is a very good point. Since we last met with yourselves, the projection of a £106 million less gap is important, but it is a data question. I know that we will come on to those questions later on, but thank you very much. Can you touch on forecast accuracy? You have highlighted it from the 4 per cent down to the 2 per cent. Can you mention that I meant two one-off factors? I don't know if you just want to say a little bit more around that. I suppose that it is probably looking in the years ahead as well, how difficult or much easier is that going to be as you go ahead? You have touched on it as well as looking on how you assess Government policy when you are looking at that. How does that work and Government work closer with you in that regard? What is the relationship in that way as you develop that? I know that it is meant to be almost a step back in looking at it, but could there be closer work between yourselves and the Scottish Government in the forecast element? I will go first, and I will hand over to David Michael as well if I can get anything. You are right that the forecast accuracy is down from 4 per cent to 2 per cent. The key reason for that really is that when we first do our assessment of the forecast accuracy, we use provisional data, and then when we later on get the fully out audited data from Audit Scotland, and that identified a slight issue with the data that was in the provisional and once you adjusted for that, the forecast error comes down to 2 per cent. To be honest, you get those things all the time between provisional and then ultimately it was audited. Clearly ultimately it is the audited ones that are the most important. It is just a timing issue that when we do our forecast evaluation report in the summer that is not ready yet. When you look at what Audit Scotland said, it is broadly said that the error that it found was isolated, so that is not a recurring thing that will happen. That broadly explains that. You have brought a point about uncertainty into the future and touched on this a wee bit with the answer to Jeremy Balfour around where in this particularly with adult disability payment and child disability payment we are in this really challenging period in the forecast element of setting up these new payments in that we know what the policy are, they are now being rolled out, but we do not yet have the exposed data to see how these are affecting. We have made over a number of years in consultation with government and also through our own judgments about what we think might happen, about the changes in policies and drawing on evidence about what has happened in the past, but there are margins for error in that and it will only be once we start to get the data coming through can we actually know while this is what is coming through additional takeover, this is what is happening with additional eligibility or this is what is happening with the payment and we have just got to be patient about that and we will start to know that, but that comes on to the data point. The better granular data we get, the sooner we get it then we can start to make these assessments and do that. In terms of the relationship, we obviously have a very close working engagement with an official level with the Scottish Government and Social Security Scotland about the data and I think that since we wrote in the summer we have had conversations with them about the data that we need, the types of information that we need. Also during this forecast round had really quite helpful discussions with senior colleagues in the Government just on the qualitative side, so what is their sense about how things are going, is there anything that they would say that actually we are finding something completely different to what we thought and what they did as well, so I think that in this period those sorts of positive constructive discussions I think are really helpful, but ultimately it will be when we get the data that we start to properly assess this and then see whether the programmes are being as or having the transformation that they would hope to. Just to take some of those questions a bit further and actually again some of the questions have already been answered, but on the data point what further data do you think you need from Social Security Scotland? You mentioned earlier about some of the data you get from the DWP being able to allow you to make some further assumptions about the impact or where the spikes are coming from. Do you expect that Social Security Scotland will gather similar data? Have you asked them for it? You'll know that we have Social Security Scotland in shortly, so it can be a timely opportunity for us to indicate if there were any areas that you felt they might need to consider. Yeah, so just a really quick answer, I'll head over to David who's probably working on this slightly longer than me, so we don't yet have the data, so obviously added disability payment is just being rolled out, but child disability payment being out since November and we don't have the data that we need to change our forecast in there, so we don't know things like average payment award, we don't know things like number of new clients and inflows coming in, so and we really need that information in order to be able to assess what's going on there. We've written to Social Security Scotland in the summer and we've copied to the committee here about our statement of data needs and what we need and the key point being not just the quality data that we need for the new set, but it's the transition period that is really important to be able to see whether or not these changes and policies have a difference, but I'll head over to David to give some broader reflections on the work around data and what we need. We're going back again to child disability payment. One of the issues that I think we talked about last time we talked to you was the issue about collecting data on the sex of the child. Now that's not being done systematically by Social Security Scotland. Data about the sex of the child is just done through the qualities monitoring part of the application. It's not actually done as part of the application process itself. Now that may not matter in terms of the multiple war that Social Security Scotland gives people, but what might matter is if there's certain types of conditions, which are more prevalent amongst say boys rather than girls, then being able to get data on the sex of the application or the applicant helps us to understand whether those trends are there. It helps with a better forecast to what extent there will be higher average awards because of the composition of the children. One piece of work that people have to do at some point is, as we get enough data coming through the qualities monitoring form, try to see how well that matches up with other forms of data. It's been collected by DWP through their process in England to see whether there are systematic biases in the application people who are choosing not to use the qualities monitoring form or systematically do that when it's a boy rather than a girl, for example. If there was a systematic bias there, that could really affect our forecast to future. If what was coming through in the qualities monitoring form was broadly matching up with what would have happened on the application form, then over a period of time it might not matter so much that we're not getting it through the application form. We can use what's there through the qualities monitoring portion, but we won't know that for a period of time. Unless Social Security Scotland were to change their policy, there will be an issue there about that form of data that will persist. We could ask them, but do you know why they made that decision? I think that it would be up to them to answer that question. On the data points that you raised, Professor Roy, do you have Social Security Scotland said that they will be able to collect that data? Get an update in the spring. In part of the conversations, they said that we will get basic data for the child disability payment and adult disability payment in the spring. As I said, we're in this challenging time where even on adult disability payment, because it's only just started, we don't know whether what we get is genuinely reflective of the longer-term trends that we'll need. It will be slightly better than the child disability payment because we'll have it running for a longer period of time, so on the timing part, it will probably be another year or so before we can say much more confident on the adult disability payment part. The data that we get in spring will be really important and we'll know then about how granular it is, how comparable it is to DWP data, how the transition has been handled, so we can track people coming through from moving from one to another to see whether there's been any changes in there. The spring is probably going to be that data released to us and it's probably going to be really important to see how robust it is and how helpful it is in order to assist the forecasts. Are there any obvious differences that you already know between the data that's collected at DWP and Social Security Scotland, other than what we've just discussed? Yeah, I think that broadly what we've discussed is that once we get it, I think that it will be the key thing to track it through. As I said, the sorts of information that we'll need, like average payment, like the payment flows, all of those things will be the things that really help for the forecasting, because then we can then start to say, well, this is what's been captured, so if we then make these assumptions going forward about cost of living or about take-up or about eligibility, then we can start to adjust that. Once we get the data, we'll be when we can really make an assessment on that. An important issue here is not just about collecting the data, it's also about publishing the data, because we like to base our forecasts on published data so that if somebody else wants to go out there and try to replicate our forecasts, they can do so. This is all part of our mission to be very transparent about how we produce our forecasts. We always tend to rely on published data rather than data that's given to us through the back door, as it were. It's really quite important that Social Security Scotland doesn't just collect the data but finds tools and techniques to publish that data, and DWP has a well-developed tool called Static Explorer, which they use to make their data available. If the Social Security Scotland can develop a similar tool, that would be really helpful to us. You're relying on data just now that isn't published. Again, it's something that you'd have to pursue more with them, but at the moment we don't see that coming along. Our understanding is that, yes, the volume of data that Social Security Scotland will publish on child disability payment will increase, but we're not sure whether the data that they provide in March will be published at the same time as they are able to provide it to us for the forecasting. Just following up on that similar thing in regard to adult disability payment, on page 91 of your report, you state that we are concerned that CDP data to some of those issues will carry over to adult disability statistics. Again, what conversations have you had with Social Security Scotland in regard to that? How reassured are you? Obviously, Social Security Scotland are in after you this morning. Is this something that we should be pursuing or are you content with what you're hoping to get? I think that that phrase in there is essentially broadly saying that the access to the quality data that we need on child disability payment is, broadly speaking, the same issues that we need for adult disability payment. The magnitudes are much bigger, which is why it's from a funding point of view rather than a Social Security point of view. That's why it's really, really important on that. As I said, I think that our statement of data needs still stands, so the letter that we wrote in the summer and the request for the data is still the key thing. We don't have that data, so we're not being able to update our forecast this time around because we don't have the data. We've been engaging with Social Security Scotland and the Scottish Government to impress on the need for getting that data, and we've had constructive conversations with them over this time period, but we don't have the data. We're told that we'll get updated data, usable data in March, basic data, but until we get that, we don't really know. As I said, we've written on statement of data needs and any support in strengthening that request for data needs would be very welcome. We'll move now to Paul McLeanon to finish us off for this session. I just want to bring back to the point that you made at the start of talking about fiscal framework. I suppose that it's maybe more your thoughts on the fiscal framework part of the issue. I think that myself is the complexity of the existing fiscal framework and other discussions on going on at the moment between the Scottish Government and the UK Government. From the commission's point of view, what are your asks, as opposed to those discussions, and what would make your life simpler in terms of your work in regard to the fiscal framework? In reference to the point that you made right at the start, saying part of the issue isn't about the fiscal framework, it's maybe your asks and what would make it easier for you in terms of the discussions, because obviously in Social Security there's a lot of discussion between the UK Government and the Scottish Government. What would make it easier in terms of the fiscal framework? First of all, you expect me to say this, but obviously it's a Government negotiation around the fiscal framework, ultimately, and it's for the two Governments to decide on that. A broader point, I think, I would make. Avoiding the politics is what would your message be to the two and what are the key things that you would like to see them discuss without going into the actual specific details. As an outside organisation into all of this, one of the things that I think I've been struck by and that we now have a much better handle on is the uncertainty that exists in fiscal and economic forecasting. I don't think that we really thought too much about that back in 2016 when this was being designed for good reason about setting up a framework. I think that this is why the review was always designed to be quite timely after five or six years of the framework being agreed that we could look back and say, actually, how is it coping at the levels of borrowing and forecasting, all those sorts of things, as designed as perhaps we would hope to have been or thought there would be. For me, the key part of looking back on the fiscal framework review and thinking about it is how much uncertainty we thought, is the movability going into this that we thought. Part of that is because we've been through quite an exceptional economic period. Who would have thought that back then you would have Brexit, a cost-living crisis, war in Ukraine, a global pandemic? There's lots of economic uncertainty in there, but we've now got a much better handle. That's where our forecast evaluation reports are really quite good, about how things are moving around, so how things potentially are moving around on the income tax forecasts, on the economy forecasts and on social security. My advice on that would be when we're looking at the fiscal framework review is to look at our evidence and say, actually, given the movability and how this is impacting on the potential projections for funding, do we have the right tools? Do we have the right flexibilities to manage this? Do we have the freedoms to adjust all of this that we think we would like to have, and then it's ultimately for them to decide whether or not that's the case or not? That's really useful. Thank you. Let's just add two points. Just going back on the last point that Graham made is that I think we've made this point in some of our reports, is that it is striking that the borrowing limits and the limits of what can be paid into and drawn down in the reserves don't vary with the size of the budget. I have raised this in this committee, as other members know, so that's, again, very interesting hearing and hardening to know, so thank you for that. A second observation is that what we see is that there's a learning process taking place here, or discussions with the Scottish Government suggest that they're really starting to learn how to think about managing some of this uncertainty that Graham was talking about, looking ahead and seeing what is a big reconciliation coming along, when can we think about doing various things with various other elements of funding that we've got, to try to land that particularly well, so there has been a learning process taking place here and I think we're all getting a bit smarter at doing this stuff. Appreciate that, thank you. Thank you all for providing evidence this morning. It's been very helpful, especially in advance of our next session, so I will briefly suspend to allow the setup of our next panel and thanks again. Welcome back everyone. The committee will now take evidence from Social Security Scotland on its performance and operation, so I welcome to the meeting David Wallace, chief executive, James Wallace, deputy director for finance and corporate services and Janet Richardson, sorry, excuse me, deputy director for client services delivery. I'll invite David Wallace to make any opening remarks before we begin with questioning. Thank you, and good morning members. I'm grateful to the committee for inviting me to give evidence today. With me is Janet Richardson and James Wallace, who I believe most members will have met. So it's just over a year since I last appeared before committee and once again it's been a hugely significant year for Social Security Scotland. We launched adult disability payment, the most complex benefit that Social Security Scotland has yet delivered and I was pleased to welcome some committee members to our Dundee headquarters in the spring to hear about our preparations. By the end of October we have received over 18,000 part 2 applications, which we are working through as quickly as possible. This has come alongside work to transfer existing awards for PIP and child disability living allowance to Social Security Scotland and we have already transferred over 34,000 clients, making sure they experience no breaks in payment. Last month, we extended Scottish child payment to children under 16, receiving 123,000 applications in less than a month. Social Security Scotland has grown rapidly over the last year. With over 4,000 staff now in post, we have completed our volume recruitment, meaning that we are well positioned for our live benefits and the new winter heating payment from next February. Obviously, we don't do this alone. Our colleagues in the core Scottish Government continue to deliver the systems and processes that we need to administer our benefits and work with ministers on the policy of devolved benefits. As always, therefore, I will not be able to comment on policy decisions. While we have grown and changed as an organisation, I am pleased to see some consistency as well, both in the commitment of our staff and, most importantly, the standard of service that we offer to clients. Social Security Scotland saw the second highest engagement score of any civil service organisation in 2021, People Survey, and I was heartened at our latest client survey that 94 per cent of respondents said when asked that they were treated with kindness. Of course, much remains to be done. We are just past the midway point of the biggest agile delivery programme in the history of Scottish Devolution. Our systems and processes are still developing, and I welcome the Audit Scotland in their recent report commenting on the focus on continuous improvement, which is very much at the heart of our operation. Finally, with the Scottish Visual Commission forecasting that Social Security Scotland will be responsible for more than £5 billion of benefit expenditure in the next financial year, including direct support to more than a million clients, the importance of this work will only grow. I look forward to answering any questions. Thank you very much, David. We will move straight to questions for members, and I will bring Pam Duncan-Glancy in first. Thank you very much, convener. Good morning. Thank you for your opening statement. Audit Scotland said in the report that we have heard a bit this morning about data collection, but it said that there are inherent uncertainties about staffing. Can you explain a bit about what they are, what you are doing around staffing, and do you expect some of the spending reductions announced recently to have an impact on the staffing levels in Social Security Scotland? I think that the first part of that, the uncertainties are as they have always been, so I was reading the spice briefing just reflecting back on my appearance last year, so they remain the same. Clearly, there is still policy behind benefits being developed, there are still systems behind benefits being developed until they come to us for implementation, so those are always going to be variables and uncertainties until we actually know what the system is going to look like. I think that that is the main driver around about the staffing level of the organisation. The more that technology does, the fewer staff we need, the more that we have got manual processes, the more staff that we need as well, so that is fundamentally going to be always the case. In terms of the budget and our position, I believe that we are in a good strong position in terms of the administration costs of the organisation, so Janet May might want to say more about it, but we are in a good position in terms of those benefits that are close to being implemented, so wind-eating payment. With carers allowance replacement, obviously we are a bit further away and we will still need to work with colleagues about exactly what that looks like before we can say what staffing looks like. I appreciate that. This morning, in terms of operations and budgets, we heard some information from the Fiscal Commission about data collection. Firstly, what plans do you have to collect data on the average payments, the payment flows, the transition period and all of that, but going into next year? What plans do you have to collect that and do you plan to publish that data? There are probably two things. I will come to the Fiscal Commission point probably last then, so we have started our series, as with all benefits, of publishing statistical information, so we will continue to do that for adult disability and child disability, in particular on that three-monthly cycle. We have always had those plans to do that, and that gives a degree of depth around the volumes of applications, the processing times and all those types of information. The Fiscal Commission has been looking for some quite specific information to assist with its forecasting. If you want to say a little bit more about that at the moment, we have been working really closely with the Fiscal Commission. Last week, we started some of the reporting that they want to see so that we can draw out the information from our system's quality asset before we can give it to Fiscal Commission, but it has never been a case just to be absolutely clear that we are sitting on information that we have not shared with the Fiscal Commission. The Fiscal Commission is asking for information that we are not seeing, so the process has been to go back, work with our social security programme colleagues, code the system in a way that we can extract what they are looking to see. There are probably two slightly different levels. I suspect that some of the information that the Fiscal Commission will want to see will not necessarily be appropriate for our statistical publication, so there will be a twin-track approach to that. At the minute, do you think that the Fiscal Commission is relying on data that is published, or is it mainly data that you are making privately available to them? It is a bit of both. I think that I caught a little bit of Graham Roy's evidence beforehand, so I would echo some of the stuff that he said. I think that it is the early days of it, so for adult disability, we really just do not have any of the depth of data. It is not a case even of trying to find specific data that they are looking for. The system is just in such an early state that we do not know what the flows look like yet. We are working with Fiscal Commission on what it needs. One of the things that we have been trying to do far more with the Fiscal Commission is to give a little bit more of the soft intelligence, which, in the absence of some of those hard figures, has been quite keen to understand. Colleagues on each side of me have been involved in some of those rounds of forecasting with the Fiscal Commission, and that can be some of the behavioural stuff that we are seeing, even down to some of our marketing communications activity. They can find that information quite valuable, so not all of it is hard stats, but inevitably there will be some as well. Did you do any work initially with the DWP to look at the sort of data that they gather to give intelligence, not just for their operations but also for the future of forecasting, and how much of that did you consider to replicate? If you did not replicate it, why did you make those choices? Our analysts have always worked quite closely with the DWP. Like everything else, what we have been delivering is through an agile delivery, as I said in my opening statement. That is the biggest agile delivery that the Scottish Government has done since devolution. There is always that balance around about paying money to citizens that they need versus having a fully fledged system in the background to do everything that we would like to see. The data collection for Fiscal Commission is just one of those things. Janet certainly, from an operational perspective, would like to see lots of suites of information as well, so it is not simply a case of surprise or we have ignored something in it. There is an inevitable consequence of the way that we are delivering, and I do not mean that in any sense the form of criticising it. It is a feature of agile in the same way that some other elements might come on and talk about technical debt as a feature of an agile delivery system. We have never been in a position to say that we will have everything in place that we need, and then we will start delivering benefits that have simply not been the approach that we have taken. Do you know when those systems will have the information that you need to collect built into them? There is probably, again, two things. There is a tactical solution to that, so tactical work on that has already begun. We had a successful deployment last week, which would let us see some of those reports on our analysts or quality assuring that before we can give that data to Fiscal Commission. I think that there is a further bit of work about replicating, as you say, what is available from the DWP, and they have a very matured advanced statistical system where interested users can manipulate information directly. That is a much more strategic longer term bit of work. We have set up with our programme colleagues a user group that is now looking at those longer term use of stats. For Fiscal Commission, we have undertaken to try and get what information we can to them for the next round of forecasting, and that work is already well under way. Replicating as it were what the DWP have in place will be a longer term bit of work. Thank you, Pam. We have a supplementary from Jeremy Balfour on that point. Thank you. Good morning, David, and to your team. Good to see you again. I am just a wee bit confused because, obviously, this is a system that we have designed from scratch. I appreciate that it has been designed by the Scottish Government for a year now working it with, but it was thought to me as a kind of amateur IT person, you would want to start at the very beginning with getting the same information and data that DWP are collecting so that we can compare apples with apples. What you are saying to us is that we are not going to be able to compare for ADP what would have happened with DWP. If people stayed on PIP compared to now on ADP, we would not be able to compare that information because you are not recording it in the same way as DWP, which means from a scrutiny panel perspective, how can we know if the information is then going to help us after questions that we get because it is not the same information we are comparing? I do not quite see why we did not design it from the start so that we could compare the same information. Sorry if I have not explained that correctly. At a basic level of the number of people applying what level of award they are getting, what condition they are getting for it, that is information that is recorded. The point about agile development is that what we do not have is a sophisticated bit of software that we put all of that data in that allows external users to manipulate it in a way that they might want to do that. That has been a functionality that we have not had from day one in the system. The systems are different, so the systems do not replicate themselves exactly. DWP will collect data, for example, on the outsourced assessments, how the passage of time between outsourcing and assessment to coming back in, those things simply do not exist in our system, so we will never replicate that because the processes are different. However, in terms of the level of award, how many people are getting which elements of award, how many people are taking up a motability scheme, those elements are things that we will be able to monitor and compare, and we have been able to do some of that very early comparison with it. One of the things that the Fiscal Commission is looking for is a point-in-time data about awards almost in real time. That is what we simply do not have the functionality to give at the moment. However, there are clear comparables that we want and we need to be able to compare the systems in terms of outcomes, but there will be some differences in what we monitor. I would like to ask some questions about the process and times for the Scottish child payment. Can you tell us what is the current process and time for applications that has ended in 2014? I did not possibly catch the end of that, but I think that it was around about process, current process and time for Scottish child payment. Is that correct? Since the benefit was extended in the 14th of November. It is really too early to say since the benefit was extended in particular to clients with children up to age 16. One of the reasons for that is that when we extended that, we worked really closely with our Scottish Government and programme colleagues. The change of that system should not be underestimated just how significant of technology advance that was. Scottish child payment extension for the first time brings with it a degree of automating and straight through processing. Of those 123,000 applications that I mentioned in my opening statement, a number of those applications will effectively run straight through the system. Since we have brought those into the organisation, we would expect those to be a very short period of time. However, those cases that fall out will require a degree of manual intervention by some of Janet's team. Therefore, at the moment, there would be a very wide range of what a typical processing time looks like. As routinely, we will be publishing the statistical publication that says that out, and I think that the next one is due in the early new year. That would be the first sort of reflection as to what the November intake has done for us. I will maybe just bring Janet in if that is okay just to say a little bit around about how we are doing what that feels like. However, it is worth saying just before I do that this is the biggest intake of applications that the organisation has ever had. You may recall when we initially launched Scottish child payment, we took a mechanism that allowed people to apply slightly early so that we could get our hands on the application and preparation for it. At this time round, we have not done that, despite the numbers being more significant, and it was that reliance and straight through processing that we need to have a significant chunk of those applications go straight through the system. However, I do not know, Janet, if you want to answer that. Thank you. Good morning, convener and members. In addition to what David has said, over 80,000 applications came in within the first two days, so it shows what a huge number of people are waiting for this benefit. We do not underestimate that, and we are doing as much as we can to process them quickly. Tens of thousands of people will receive that benefit before Christmas, but some will not. We have made that very clear to clients that we will do our very best, but we cannot guarantee that. We are keeping clients updated by text and using social media on what we are doing, but we will, as David said, be able to give more of it a processing time figure early in the new year. Thank you for that. Is there any obvious way for you to improve the processing times or to help clients to track progress of their applications? For example, it has been mentioned that an online app or account might help with that. Would it improve them, and if so, would you be implementing that? My personal view is that automation is the way to improve some of the processing times and continuous improvement on automation, as a theme will come back to absolutely to do that. As I said, the internal automation of some of those applications is the first time that we have done that with the extension of Scottish child payment. The client-facing portal is something that we are working with programme colleagues on as well. My personal opinion would be that, yes, that would assist. In some way, at least, it would let people who are able to track online get a sense of where their application was, and inevitably, if they are able to do that, it reduces the demand on janets from facing contact centres and makes sure that we are able to process applications quicker. However, as always, with everything that we are doing with social security, our programme colleagues will do some work. We have some of that client feedback from the client survey, but we will do a little bit more research as to whether that would help us as well. My personal view is that, yes, people are used to seeing progress tracking in an automated way, and those who are technically able to do that would probably find that helpful. However, we will see what users have told us about it. Again, I should emphasise absolutely that the programme of delivery work for benefits, as I have said previously as committee, is, from our perspective, incredibly pressurised and incredibly tight, so a new bit of technology would need to find a way into that timetable somehow. We do not have a separate magic way of producing that to the side of the main delivery of benefits. Thank you very much for that response. The first thing that I would say is that having that online capability for people to check was probably one of the few things that people liked about the universal credit system. Is there a reason why you did not build that from the start, or is it back to the Agile methodology problem? I think that it is back to the Agile methodology. I agree with you. It has come through for a couple of years now in that client survey that people who are comfortable and familiar online do find that and experience it in other places as well. I used to deal with commercial utilities or others, so I think that it is a logical thing for us to explore. However, you are absolutely right that the reason why we do not have it comes back to the same point about statistics. What are the things that we have been operating on and what is called a minimum viable product? We have been layering that up as benefits come on board. We have had four years in essence of our minimum viable products being built up and every time we do that, more functionality comes into place, but that has never been a place of developing one system and then running a benefit live as well. I could say a little bit more about that if that is helpful, because I think that one of the things that is also different from the DWP is that we have one base system underpinning all of our benefits. We do not build a system for Scottish child payment, we do not build a system for best art grants and add it into the organisation. There is a single platform, so every time now that we are dropping more functionality, the testing of that platform is something that becomes more and more difficult and complex every time that we do that. The amount of time that we have to do that without bringing down operations and closing that to the public becomes more and more pressurised, so we try to do that over a weekend period. All of that is a balance. It is a balance about whether we want to wait for clients to be able to see progress of their applications online, or do we extend the Scottish child payment that is some of the choices that we have to make? I understand that. I can see that because of the choices that have been made so far. I know that there are countless problems with the DWP and the way that they do things. I get that, not least policy, but I cannot explain why there was a decision taken not to just lift the technology that they use and apply it to the policy and the specifics for Scotland, rather than completely start from scratch and then face the situation that you have just described, which is shutting down the system for the weekend to try to catch up and inevitably continue to have to bolt on additional bits to IT and have that appear to be a bit of a substandard system? I would probably disagree with the point that is substandard. I think that there are pros and cons to it. I do not think that the option is that the DWP is not a single system. There is no single system that we could have looked at and said that if we take that, that will support all of our benefit delivery. This is one of the challenges that we come to when we talk about data with DWP. Again, it is because you are scanning lots and lots of different systems, some of them quite old, some of them themselves going through transformation programmes. It was not as simplistic as saying that there is a thing here that if we could just lift or replicate, we could bring here and it has all the functionality attached to it. DWP systems have grown up over decades in different ways for different benefits. There was not an option that simply said that there is a thing at the core here that we want to replicate. We have ended up with a primary contractor, an IBM, who does work with DWP. Again, at the heart of this is a bit of technology that is working in elements of DWP. We have gained advantages of understanding how that replicates, but there simply was never a thing that said, take system X and bring it up and replicate it. We have had both benefits and disadvantages of that not being available, but all those options were looked at at the very early stages of the programme and there simply was not a thing to lift and shift. That is helpful to understand that. One final question on this is around the about 200,000 applications for the Scottish child payment that were expected when the increase came on, about 8,000 or 9,000, I think, of the figures that happened. What happened to the other people and do you know what information you have about those missing people and how much it is to do with the fact that the website was either undergoing some development or crashed, or whatever happened to her if you looked into that? If I take the numbers one first, I think that the 200,000 was about children that was being quoted. That is the fiscal commission's number around about the number of children that would expect to be benefiting from it. The 123,000 applications are applications. Some applications will be for more than one child, so we will not know how many children those 123 applications represent until we are, as the previous question had asked, got some further statistics and threw the system on it. To give you some illustration, until we had extended Scottish child payment, the ratio was approximately 1.3, so that meant that for every application we had about 1.3 children included in the applications. Naturally, we would expect that to grow a bit, given that the age range has increased significantly. Within those 123,000 applications will be more than 123,000 children, so we need to understand what that gap looks like. In the early days of that, we need that to flow through the system before we have that information. I have a couple of questions. In the charter, one of the measures in the charter is the percentage of applications processed within 10 working days. In 2021-22, the majority of claims were not processed within this time framework. I wonder why that is the case. Are you hoping to do better next year, and if so, what target are you looking to set yourself for the coming year? We have always been, as you are aware, quite careful about trying to set a target, mainly if it drives the wrong type of behaviour. The 10 days in the customer charter is an ambitious measure, so it is right that we measure it, but it is always going to be a relatively small proportion of cases that we would hit that 10-day figure. The thing about the customer charter is the balance of all those measures, making sure that how people are treated, the outcome matters and all the rest of it. The 10 days will be incredibly challenging for particularly disability-related benefits, low-income benefits, and I might just bring Janet on this. The automation that we have referred to is straight through processing, but it has multiple benefits on a single application. Those things will help to drive down those dates. I think that, when Janet was in front of the committee supporting the minister previously, we were having a period during the summer when our processing time was too long, and Janet covered at the point where some of the activity that we are trying to do to drive that down. It will be continuous improvement on the organisation, it will be automation and it will be focusing on some of those things. The 10 day was never a target that we would try to work to. It is right, it is in the charter and it is important, but I think that it is one of those things that we need to balance off with the other measures, so the 94 per cent measure that I would say as well. If you could have a charter, I have a reading comment to say that we are never going to hit the figure or we are not going to get most of it done. What is a realistic time application? Have I put in an application for ADP? What is my expectation? We are doing a bit of work at the moment with clients for exactly that, and I know that we faced some criticism when we took down the 8 to 10 weeks indicator from the website. The reason why we did that was to not miss lead to clients as to what was to be expected. 10 days will not be achievable for disability benefits, not least we have changed the system. We are in a position now where we are collecting information on behalf of clients, so I cannot see how we will get to a position where the vast majority of disability benefits would be achieved within a 10 day turnaround, but we are working with clients now for exactly what those expectations are and how best it would be to relay those expectations. Is it a static website indicator? Do they want something more dynamic? Is it text that would give a more regular update of where we are with processing? There are a number of measures on the charter that I think balance out, and it is important. I am certainly not dismissing making timely decisions, but it is absolutely important. We saw that over the summer, that we were getting to a level where both individual clients and stakeholders were unhappy with that service. That is probably something that the committee needs to go back and discuss with the Scottish Government, because if we have a charter and people read that charter, if we are never going to hit those figures, then it is almost not worth the paper that is written on. If I can just move on very quickly to just one other area. I mean, back in October, as you said, your colleague Janet Caiman gave evidence. One of the things that she said there was, we recognise with applications opening Sunday or Christmas, people will be concerned about getting their money by then, so clearly this was an issue that you were thinking about back in the autumn of this year. On Facebook yesterday, you put up this comment to your clients. Because of a volume of applications, some people who applied in the week may not get a decision until early 2023. What discussions did you have with Scottish Government to say that we cannot deliver this for a substantial number of people? What planning did you do so that we could limit the number? Because the numbers seem to be fairly high that are not going to get their money. I just think again, if we are trying to devise a system that we have all talked about, dignity, respect and all those words, we do not seem to be doing that with this new system. I will bring Janet back into that expectation and communication. I will come back to the point that the extension of Scottish child payment to those under 16 is within the existing devolution programme, the biggest single intake of applicants that we will ever have into a system. How we transition that volume in at a single point in time is always going to be enormously challenging. We cannot physically gear up our staff up to give the same level of service on week one or two than we will once that becomes a more business-as-usual activity. Those conversations were had routinely with Scottish Government. The way we develop our systems and processes as part of the agile delivery is that we have interdisciplinary teams, so our staff work with Scottish Government on a constant basis around the implementation of systems and what that means and the impact on the organisation. We have also become a really large complex organisation where we point to the communications that we put out and drive demand into the system. We will have known that that Facebook post would bring people into the organisation contacting us. Those things are done through the programme, through that delivery chain as part of an integrated team. When I say discussions with Scottish Government, what we do is a letter exchange of what the impact will be. We are working with them around about it, but coping with that huge surge in demand on that first week was always going to be a huge challenge for us. As I said, we did not do what we did at the outset of take applications early. The reason we did not do that is that we needed the automation of the function to work and push cases through. That is where Janet might want to come in and say that we need a level of automation in order for those cases to come through. We do need that level of automation. The other reason that we chose to do that launched this way is that some people would get their money before Christmas. That was the earliest state through the legislation that we could open for applications. Rather than say, apply now and pay later, we knew that it was important for some people to get their money before Christmas. I do not think that we have ever said that everyone would. We have said that we realise that people would like that to happen. Part of what we are doing is managing people's expectations. That particular Facebook post yesterday was in order to make sure that we could do that. We told clients that they would get their benefits before Christmas. What we did not want them to do was to assume that that would mean that that would add the increase of Scottish child payment that they had recently applied for. It is a balance between managing clients' expectations and making sure that they get the money that they need and that they know that it will be backdated. I accept that, at this time of year, people would rather have the money now, but I do not think that we have ever promised that we would be able to deliver that to everyone this side of Christmas. I want to touch on the charter research and specifically with regard to improvements that the organisation is taking forward following that research. It is worth saying that, by and large, it was positive, but I just wondered what learning you had taken on from that. I think that, by and large, it is positive, so I do not say that in any way to be complacent about it. We also need to remember that the charter research reflects the financial year of 2021-22, so it is essentially speaking to a group of clients who have not gone through the adult disability payment process. With all those things, it is a point in time. I come back to some of the previous questions. The continuous improvement element around it is the timescales. We are getting a clear indicator now that, particularly during that point in time that was taken, we were at a point of timescales that people were finding unacceptable and we needed to improve on those timescales. It ties back to the communications point, both how we communicate with our broad range of clients, whether we can do something smarter technology and whether there was a focus on particular groups that we need to communicate with slightly differently. We have talked a lot about technology and I would agree with the technology point. Technology will allow us to focus our scarce resource on those who most need it, if the majority of people can work through a system digitally by choice. There are probably some things that I might bring Janet and just to say some of the working groups that are going on around those communications elements, but the thing that I personally took from it was back to the point that has been made here around about timelines. I think that we need to focus on the continuous improvement of the organisation and that focus on timelines. I might come back and just say a little bit more then, but I will let Janet come in on that. Yes, probably the key thing for us, as David said, is that processing times in particular in the disability benefit space as much as anything? It is just important to note that of all the case managers that we have recruited and trained and are delivering, we still have some who are not fully in that live service yet, so they will not be until the end of January, so we will start to see things progress and ramp up from the new year. In addition to that, we have talked about how it is better for us to keep people informed and updated whilst we are still working through their claims. One of the areas that we talked about in terms of communications was particularly how we communicate with older people in our communities. Our local delivery teams are out and about doing a lot of work and are doing a lot of cost of living events and warm hub events with stakeholders. A lot of the work is not just about improving our service, it is improving the contact that we have with clients to make sure that what we deliver meets their needs. That is helpful, thank you. On that very point with regard to signposting towards the voice-ability advocacy service, how have you taken that forward since we last met? There was obviously a lot of talk about recruitment of these individuals and maybe just specifically for non-verbal clients, so I wondered how that had been taken forward as well. Okay, so just in general, so absolutely we've worked really closely with our voice-ability clients. They have also come to talk to the stakeholder group that we meet regularly to make sure that not just us but stakeholders are aware of the impact that they can have and what the services they deliver. They have taken away some actions to work very closely with a couple of those groups. We also invited voice-ability in to the organisation to spend time with our client advisors, not just the ones on local delivery but the ones on telephony as well, to make sure that they are aware of the service. We have appointed what we call advocacy champions within the organisation too, so they regularly keep new client advisors and teams up-to-date to remind them that they need to make sure that clients are aware that there is an alternative to what we offer in terms of local delivery. Do you want to pick up a bit of that? Just to say, I've met the chief executive, Jonathan Senker, on a couple of occasions as well, so much of the work that Janet's outlining there, we've been really keen to see that the organisation is working together. Clearly, we also need to do it in a way that protects voice-ability independence, so a lot of what we've been trying to do is link them up with stakeholders that we're already working with. As Janet mentioned, it's sort of stakeholder forums, so I think for us it's about that advice that our clients can give with the awareness of it. Again, I think we want to increase that awareness of the service within our client advisors as well. Helpful, and it's not so much a question, but one of the things that would be helpful for the committee is to find out data around where those individuals will be based as well. I don't think that's been clear. Also, potential for home visits, that originally was being flagged as one of the key reforms, and I haven't been able to find out whether or not that's taken place or how many people have actually applied for that. I don't know if that's within systems data that you can provide as well. So there's voice-ability doing some stuff and there's us doing some stuff. Clearly, for that independent purpose, we don't manage the voice-ability contract, we didn't let it and we don't manage it, so that's probably a point for the Scottish ministers and policy colleagues to address. We aren't sighted and I've got no input to where they put voice-ability staff or how they're delivering those appointments. In terms of our local delivery staff, we now have those in all local authority areas of Scotland. With adult disability, their activity has been ramping up. We probably can give some of that data around about visits that they're undertaking, but I can absolutely confirm that those home visits are happening where they're needed to happen. We've got examples, really strong examples of some of our local delivery client advisers repeatedly going out to a home visit if they feel that they need to provide additional support. It is, I think, a really important difference in the system when we talk about PIP moving into adult disability. I always focus on clinical assessments, changing to be consultations internally, the application process and local delivery so that providing support where people need it is really important. The Government has invested in this organisation to resource up to enable that to happen and in some ways that should reduce the need for advocacy in some places because we are helping people with their applications where they need it. Thank you. I wonder if I can just have a quick question around redetermination matters for child disability payment. As I read the figures, 85 per cent of those that went for redetermination were granted. I wonder why you think that such a high rate and is certainly higher than used to be under the DWP scheme. What's happening in that first application looked by your staff? I'll say a couple of things. I'll certainly let Janet say a bit more about what Janet manages, the redetermination teams. I'll caution slightly against the direct comparison with DWP. We have always said that redetermination should be a step back from the case by people who have never been involved in the case before and looking afresh at it. The high level is probably, and Janet will say more about this, driven by additional information coming in, so I don't have figures to hand about what percentage of that percentage is driven by additional information, but it will be a significant high volume where we are gathering more information at the redetermination stage than we've had available to the people who made that first decision. There is also something here about the newness of it. Even when we looked at low income benefits, there would tend to be a higher redetermination level in the early days of it. The organisation is new to this. We have a new scheme, new policy, new staff, everything that it touches is effectively for the first time in the early stages of this. I would say that that figure is predominantly driven by new evidence coming in at the redetermination stage. One of the changes that was meant to happen under the scheme was that you would look for the information first time around. Clearly, that's not happening. I wonder what training has now been given so that it's not the claimant providing that information, but you'll find the information to get it right. Of all the scheme, the application form and the way we apply it is different. The criteria for the award has not changed at all in regard to child disability payment. I'm not quite sure—yes, it's a new system, but it's not a new criteria. People are still getting an award on the same criteria. Have the training not been there for the people? Why are they not going for that information first time around? I'll let Janet say a little bit more about that. You're right that that's part of the system, but the newness of everything else in the system. There are changes to the system. There are changes in terms of being able to draw on the clinical expertise that we've now got in the organisation, which doesn't exist in the DWP system. The point—sorry if I didn't make it well—was the newness of the organisation. We have roughly doubled in size every year that the organisation has existed. The people administering child disability payment and adult disability are new to the organisation. They've almost exclusively joined within the last year. They've almost exclusively joined during a period where Covid restrictions might have been in place. Inevitably, as we go on through that, people become more experienced, more efficient and more productive. However, we do seek to try to get evidence up front. I'll move us to come back and say one more word, but I'll let Janet say how that happens at a practical level. I think that when we're talking about the information as well, it's not necessarily information that we need to gather. Sometimes it's the information that the clients were putting on the application form. We realised very early on with child disability payment that, for all the right reasons, we had made a lot of the application form and it was voluntary whether or not the client gave us that evidence. However, we realised by the number of redeterminations that were coming in fairly quickly in that space that the client could have told us a lot more, which would have helped us to make a different decision. I think that it's fair to say that quite a significant number of that 84% or 85% of clients were actually receiving the benefit. Their redetermination was about the award rate that they wanted us to look at. So there was something for us about making sure that the clients realised and we changed the wording, particularly for the online application, about the more detail you can give us about the impact your condition or your disability has, the better, but we still do that supporting information gather on behalf of the client as well. However, what we've also put in place since then is a step where we contact the client, both adult and child disability, when they make that claim, just to talk to the client a little bit more about, is there anything else you can tell us? A really good example of that is where we can spend weeks waiting for a GP surgery to send us a list of the medication that a client is on, whereas a client often has that to hand because they've got their repeat prescription and they could upload that information and send it to us. So it's not necessarily about us not looking for that information. We do, it's how we're gathering it and we've learnt some really positive things from those early stages in child disability. Thank you, Jeremy. Pam Duncan-Glanty. Thank you, convener. I have no further questions. It was the last question that's just been answered was the one I was going to ask. Thanks. Thank you very much. In that case, I will move back to Jeremy Balfour. You may not be able to answer this, but I'm interested. The latest figures we got was under ADP, there were 1,845 new applications out of 3,545. That's been quite a high figure. I just wondered, have you any early indication why there's so many new applications at this stage? I'll come on to my second question in a moment, but have you any idea why there's so many applications or is that what you were expecting when you went live? I don't have those figures in front of me, but it might come back to that. Some of that, again, I saw a little bit of the earlier session in terms of the overall increase in applications across the UK, so what has been seen at a PIP level at UK, we are definitely seeing in a Scottish context as well in terms of increased applications. Anecdotally, I think, we'd probably heard that the welfare advice benefit advice sector had been a degree of storing up of applications, so people had been deliberately not making an application under the DWP system if they were close to either a pilot area or the national going live in Scotland. I don't think that those figures are out of kilter with what we are anticipating. In fact, if anything, we planned on a high and low range in terms of potential applications, and adult disability has more or less come in through the middle of that expected range. Sorry, do you have those numbers? I don't have them to hand, but what you said then apologies, Mr Balford. I didn't understand the question until David just said. What we did see was that spike initially, but when we look at the head of work, it is pretty much where we would have expected it to be in what we call our average forecast for now, so it is pretty much tracking that week-in, week-out. We probably saw that initial spike, which looked higher than we'd anticipated, but in terms of where we thought we would be now, it is about that average stage. That's helpful. You said in your earlier question mark back in the summer, you took down the figure of when people would expect to hear from you in regard to both initial decisions and then the redetermination. If I apply, what is my expectation now for healing in regard to the first decision, and then if I have to go to redetermination, how long that will take? From the most recent public statistics, we are in the region of about 54 working days for a decision to be made, and that I think is still, as is reflected in the spice figures of a bit of an upwards trajectory, so that 54 days is based on the last month of that data being about 77 days, so we would expect that to stabilise and ideally come down, but that's the current working time that we're looking at. The final question around this is just being very pokey on regard to the Lovians. Again, the figures that I see that there's been 55 people who have gone from being transferred from PIP to the new ADP, as not one of those 55, I'm just wondering, is that the speed of process you were expecting, because it did seem quite slow? Have you got at least a working idea of when the full transfer will take place? Are you meeting the targets that we'd already had? Are you confident that everybody who's now on PIP will be transferred to ADP on the timescale that we discussed previously? The challenge with those published figures, Mr Balfour, was that it was a very early start of case transfer, so that was, as you've alluded to, a very deliberate, slow start, so that we could check cases as they came in and check them. We were getting the data and information that we expected and checked that the process was working, so that has already significantly ramped up in terms of those numbers. There is a plan for the next, between now and the end of 2024, to transfer all of those. There's nothing that we're seeing at the moment, which suggests that that's not achievable. There are points in there that that does rely on quite significant volumes coming in in a single month, so I think we would want to just check that we're able to manage those big capacities. So you're quoting 50 in a particular month. I think there's a month we get to about 30,000 or in that order, so at that point we just want to make really sure, but it's the lag of the data, I think, is the problem with that particular stat, Mr Balfour. When the system was set up here in Scotland, obviously we'd said that it would be, or the Parliament at the time said that it would be, fairer. I'm slightly concerned about some of the work that I've seen around counter frauds and surveillance. Can you tell us a bit more about the team that you've set up to do that? What are the sorts of things you're doing? The job description included things like covert surveillance, which made me quite uncomfortable. So could you tell me a little bit about that and also could you tell me how much you're spending on the counter surveillance work? I will bring James in, who leads up that counter fraud team, to give a little bit more detail. I also would want to give some assurance around what that feels like for clients in the system as well. Just to be absolutely clear, we will have fraud in the Scottish system. That is undoubtedly the case. Any system of social security will have fraud in it. So our rationale for having counter fraud is to limit and detect that. The surveillance function and the ability to counter that is designed as a kind of a disincentive. The biggest element around that will be organised fraud. I'll let James say a little bit more about how we're tackling some of those. However, that is not about criminalising our clients in any way, shape or form. You'll be clear with that in the terms of the passage of the bill. We had a robust debate about error versus fraud, so I'd separate out error and fraud, as you have done. Fraud is something quite specific and different, but it does exist and we do need to tackle it. We have got full range of powers including covert surveillance. It will be used incredibly sparingly, so I don't say anything inappropriate. I'll let James say a little bit more about the set-up of the team, as far as he can, the cost of the teams and what it is currently doing. I had a suspicion that we would cover that today. I think that it is a factor of any benefit system that we will encounter fraud. My focus is organised crime that will attack our benefit system and it is a definitive risk in the system. We have developed counter-fraud capabilities over the past number of years and we have a suite of responses available to detect, prevent and address any fraud that we find in the system. We don't specifically release detail on the cost of the team because it would allow bad actors in the fraud space to size the team and size our fraud response. We are very careful what we release and it is not an attempt to be secretive or to lack transparency, so we are not undermining our counter-fraud efforts. Specifically on covert surveillance, the main thing that I want to say is that it is a highly regulated area, so those are statutory powers that we would be using where we are using or employing covert surveillance. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Scotland Act 2000 is the piece of legislation that we are using that gives us our covert surveillance powers. There are areas and tests and legislation that are set out where we can use those and they are not used lightly and they are highly controlled. Social Security Scotland has a code of practice for investigations that we publish in February 2020. It is available on our website that sets out for members or for clients exactly how we would use those covert surveillance powers. I think that the vast minority of actors in the system that are seeking to defraud us in covert surveillance is only used where it is legal, justified and proportionate. Frankly, it is a last resort. It is where our other tactics have failed and it is where there is significant theft from the public purse. This is not designed to covertly surveil an individual that has claimed best start grant fraudulently. Those powers would never be used for that. Indeed, the powers and the capabilities of the team were set up to be available and developed for the launch of the larger, more costly benefits to the public purse, such as disability benefits. If there was an industrial scale fraud perpetrated against the organisation for disability benefits, it is a high-value payment and a regular payment. The losses to the public purse could be significant and it would probably be appropriate to use all our available tactics to counter fraud. If they were exhausted, we may move to covert surveillance if that was entirely necessary and legal and proportionate. I will stop there. Can you describe the organised crime that you are talking about? There is a co-ordinated deliberate attack on the benefit system by someone who is not eligible for the benefit. They are making deliberate misrepresentations to steal from the public purse. Those are the people that we are talking about. We are not talking about an individual who inadvertently makes an error on a form or ticks a box or even misrepresents themselves on a single occasion for a single benefit. Those are not the main threats in the system. It is organised crime at the scale of public money that we are responsible for. If you look at the recently published Scottish budget, it is £5.1 billion. That is a significant element of public money. Unfortunately, fraud is a factor in our system. It is a vast minority of people and individuals. I do not even call them clients because they are not eligible for our benefits. That is what makes the fraud, but it is people out in society who will seek to attack the public purse. The scales of money that are involved require that we have powers that are commensurate with the response that is necessary to protect the public purse. Any pound that we save from a criminals bank account can go to an eligible person or another Scottish Government policy imperative. That is what is behind our counter fraud approach. I recognise that those powers are strong and that they are not used lightly. What evidence do you have of that kind of fraud and the likelihood of it happening? If I go back to the DWP, the DWP has had their accounts qualified due to regular payments for fraud and error for the last 30-something years. It is a factor and a long-standing factor of a benefit system. The levels of fraud are small. We are generally talking 1 per cent of the benefit expenditure, but 1 per cent of the benefit expenditure is a lot of money. At a UK level, it could be £1 billion. At a Scottish level, it could be £50 million. It is a significant sum of public money that we ought to have steps to protect. It is organised crime groups, so there are not many of them that we are looking to guard against, but we must remain vigilant or we will lose money. I will bring Miles Briggs in for a supplementary question, and then, if he wants to lead us on to your next set of questions as well, thank you. It was linked to that point with regard to threats to the system. I wondered and had noticed that the National Cyber Security Centre has been offering expert guidance to the organisation. Have you had any cyber security breaches to date? What strategy is taking place to build in systems to prevent that taking place, especially given what we have seen organisations like CEPA recently? I will answer that as best as I can, but I caveat that with—I am not technically minded—our chief digital officer would be happy to come and give some more in-depth detail of that. Since we have launched, we have had, as you say, we have been working with the National Cyber Security Centre at one point. We have embedded a cure of expertise building up. Ever since we have had a digital presence, we have had teams monitoring those. There will always be attempts to breach those securities, whether it is just by bots or by people in foreign state. That happens on an absolutely routine basis. I am not consciously aware of any particular incidents that I would want to bring to the committee's attention in terms of cyber security, but we would never be complacent about that approach. It is a bit like the organised fraud point that James has outlined. We know that any system that makes money available online will attempt to do some of those. As soon as you put up a website, you will find that it automatically comes under an element of test and attack. That is helpful, especially given that new systems have been put in place. It is important to build that in from the outset. I believe that the Deputy First Minister has now put a reporting function in for all public agencies to report back to the Scottish Government. The theme that I wanted to ask some questions on was about new benefits and improving systems. What is the scale of technical debt that is currently being made to develop a structured approach to addressing that? Our chief digital officer has led to putting a framework for capturing technical debt in place. From the outset, technical debt, as I think is identified in the Audit Scotland report, is a consequence of the agile approach. We would not look at technical debt and say that there is a thing that should have been done that has not. It is a consequence of those minimum viable products focusing on the delivery to citizens, but inevitably some functionality. Some of the stuff that we have mentioned already today—a statistics function, an online portal for clients—are things that, in an ideal world, we would want to see, as we have said, but we do not yet have. Chief Digital Officer is in the process of capturing all that information, assessing it with our programme colleagues, and I will turn to James on that. I think that the point is about the financial elements of that. That capture is about functionality. James, I do not know if you want to say anything about how or when that might get translated into some financial figures. I think that over time, as the answer, we have a standardised approach to assessing investment decisions in the agency that we would always look to. Does any proposal to service technical debt—or any particular piece of technical debt—how much is it going to cost, how much is it going to pay back, what is the value for money assessment of servicing that piece of technical debt? There will be a process that will need to be gone through once the initial process of devolution is complete to analyse what we wish to fix, where are the benefits, what is it going to cost and where might we not wish to service it because it does not pay back but it has not made value for the public purse. Those arrangements are fairly standard in government and they are already in place. It will be that cycle of continuous improvement that the agency moves into, where we make investments that are valuable. That is helpful. I think that my final answer to some of the questions with regard to the need for additional data. Do you have time scales or timelines for when you think that that will be fixed and put in place to be able to draw down on that data or have those data sets that can then be used? For the fiscal commission specific asks, yes, we are trying to do that for the next round of forecasting, as I said. Last week we were starting to see what those reports looked like. Our analysts are then quality assuring. Our commitment to the fiscal commission is to try to do that for the next round of forecasting. As I said earlier on, the longer work with users to determine what the community of stats users for the data looks like in Scotland, the fiscal commission will be one and some academics will be others, so we will gather that stakeholder group around and see what the ask is. Again, it is back to what can be achieved and when. That is a longer term bit of work but for the fiscal commission we are committed to try to do that for the next round of forecasting, which will be early into the new year. That is helpful. You can maybe keep the committee updated on that, because we have been having a watching brief. Finally, since the internal audit report in July, what guidance and training has been taken forward from that. Since our visit, where is your strategy or policy around working from home? I know that that was something that we discussed and a number of people back in new buildings, for example, in Dundee and things. I will cover the training point and I will maybe bring Janet in on the training point and then go to the hybrid working. From a guidance and training perspective, I think that it was highlighted in the Audit Scotland report because it was a particular risk in the run-up to adult disability. Again, there is a feature of the way that we are delivering this that guidance inevitably comes to us late. Again, that is not a criticism of anything, that is just a feature of the system that we have. There is a real challenge in getting people brought on to guidance. Bits might be missing from that guidance, which is not required for day 1. The redetermined guidance may not be there on day 1 because it is not seen as a day 1 function. You are then into a cycle of continually training people. The guidance is changing. Even as we train people in the system that they are training on, it is not necessary to reflect a live system, so we are having to put people through training on a system in one place with guidance. When they come out to consolidation, that will look different. When they come out into live, that may look slightly different as well. I think that that is the risk that they were highlighting. It was very specific around the benefit launch of adult disability payments, so that has dissipated for now. It will come back up, particularly when we go into the next big benefit launch. Possibly less so for winter heated payment, but it will certainly come back on board again for the replacement of Cairns allowance, for example. There are some improvements that we can make. Janet, you might want to say how we are doing some of that consolidation training in particular around guidance, but the nature of what we have does mean that guidance will continually change. That is a challenge for the organisation that there is a continually challenge of moving guidance. We are having to train people all the time on that, but Janet, I do not know if you wanted to briefly say anything on that training. I think that you have probably covered most of it. We learn as we go along, but the more experienced we become in the agency, the more we are able to influence the design of that training from the beginning, which, of course, is what we were not. A lot of our feedback from current or previous training goes into that, and it is in a much more stable place than it was. At the time that you were in the organisation, we were probably still trialling some of those approaches. Where we have alighted on us, we want to become a hybrid organisation, so we are deliberately not moving to a fully remote working-from-home environment. We think that there is something quite important, particularly given where we are in our development of getting our teams together for the reasons of training, the reasons for development, the reasons for building and maintaining that culture. We have said to all of our colleagues that hybrid is the approach that we are looking for. People will roughly fall into a category as to how mobile they are, whether they are local delivery, for example. They would look different. We have set a clear expectation that we would expect to see people up to two days a week in an office, and that is a ratio that essentially means that the workforce that we have at the moment is about 50 per cent occupancy, so we would want to drive that higher in the new year. However, hybrid is the approach that we have taken. We have been reasonably directive about saying that we want to see people in, and we are convinced, as a management team, that there are benefits in seeing people in the office. I think that people who are in the office are also now starting to see those benefits as well. Thank you. Finally, I want to ask that we have the minister with regard to the winter heating payments saying that his expectation was that all clients would be paid in February. Do you think that the system is in place to make that happen? The just-in-time nature of this means that there will be an element of us needing to see the data, how much drops out of that will be a challenge, and how much manual intervention is required. I might just briefly bring in, because, as I said in a previous answer, we are working hand in glove with our programme colleagues as we do that as a multidisciplinary team. We have built up resources based on what we think at the moment, and we think that we have the right resources to do that. There is still a requirement for DWP data and then seeing what that data looks like. We will get that data through in January, so we will have a better idea. However, as David said, we have the resource that we think will require already in training around that, but we have additional resource that we can use to try to make sure that, as many clients as possible, we will get that payment in February. However, it is reliant on getting the data in time for us to do that. Thank you very much, Miles. Our last questions are coming from James Dornan. It has been over a year since the launch of your local delivery service. Could you reflect on how it has gone, what you have learned and how involved the local delivery team has been in the constant improvement scene? I will say a couple of words, and I will definitely ask Janet to reflect on that as well. You are right that it has been over a year, but in essence adult disability has been the real element that has brought local delivery to the floor. I am incredibly proud of some of the work that has been done in local delivery. As I mentioned earlier, we are seeing clients who would not otherwise have completed an application form being practically assisted to do so. One of the founding principles of what we are trying to do here is to assist people to get the benefits that they are entitled to. We are seeing local delivery actively working on to do that. The way that they have done it is really important as well. We, of course, have to be mindful of resource and an element of triaging that, but where necessary we have had people in people's homes, we have had people in islands, we have had people on sparsely populated islands taking ferries and ultimately putting their wellies on to get to the places that they need to be. We have seen those leads engaging with local authorities, engaging with local voluntary organisations and becoming part of that support community. In some instances, hopefully, we have also seen those local delivery leads engaging with local MSPs and MPs and getting engaged in surgeries or workshops there as well. I am proud that I have probably missed some of the important things that they are doing, so I will just let Janet have a quick word on that. You have covered most things, David. There are a couple of key things that are important for us to highlight. That team in particular has been very supportive of people coming across from Ukraine. They have been working on the ships with people. We have received quite a number of claims that they have taken on behalf of people from Ukraine and supported them through the Scottish Government's benefits system. They are also involved in pilots in certain areas. Dundee is one in particular where we are looking proactively at reducing child poverty, so they are linking in with Dundee Council and with DWP in that area to work through cohorts of clients that perhaps all of us are coming to contact with to make sure that they are receiving everything that they are entitled to. The local delivery team is doing much more than just trying out and helping people to fill in a claim form. They are an integral part of the communities across Scotland. Can I say thanks once again for attending this morning and for giving us your evidence? We will now move into our private session and can members who are joining us remotely please use the team's link in their calendars to join the meeting.