5. To ask the Scottish Government how many Scottish child payment claims it has received for individual children and households, and how many have now been accepted and paid. (S5O-05077)

The latest published management information shows that, by 28 February, Social Security Scotland had received 98,000 applications for the Scottish child payment. Of the 85,000 applications that had been received by 14 February, 55,000 applications had been processed by the end of February. That means that 65 per cent of the applications that were received before 15 February have now received a decision. In total, 52,000 of the processed applications were approved.

Parents and carers will receive a letter advising them of the outcome of their application in due course. Details of when people should expect their first payment and how much it will be will be contained in that letter. An application could contain more than one child. Further time is required to interrogate the decisions and payments data to be able to produce robust estimates of the number of children. More detailed information on application outcomes and payments, including an estimate of the number of children who have been approved for the Scottish child payment, will be included in the next release of official statistics, which will cover the period to the end of March and is due to be published on 11 May.

I am pleased that families are starting to receive this crucial payment. The Cabinet secretary knows that up to 173,000 children are eligible for the payment. It has rightly been described as a game changer, but it is only a game changer if children actually get it. How does the cabinet secretary plan to reach all those 173,000 children and would the Government consider backdating the payment for up to a year for those who are perhaps unaware of their entitlement and apply later on?

With reference to backdating, the system for the Scottish child payment has not been built with an ability to backdate. If we were to do that, as I explained to Mark Griffin before the Scottish child payment went live, we would have had to delay the go-live date for the payment and we felt that it was important to get the payment in as quickly as possible and for money to be received as quickly as possible. We will endeavour to do everything that we can. I referred in a previous answer to the benefit take-up strategy and I will give one example of what we have been doing on that.

We have written to the individuals we know of within the data feeds from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions, proactively inviting those people to apply, and we will continue to do that as more people access the qualifying benefits. That is an example of something that the agency has done before for best start grants and is now doing for the Scottish child payment, and we will continue to do that in the future as new people access the qualifying benefits.

Making people aware of the new payment is very important, as others have said. The Cabinet secretary mentioned that the Government has contacted potential applicants who are receiving benefits. Is there any other way that the Government can make people aware that the new benefit, which is a life changer, is available to the people who are entitled to it?

I can perhaps elaborate on what else we have done for the Scottish child payment. A lot of work has been done with key and trusted stakeholders, for example to ensure that they were aware of what was going on with the Scottish child payment and encouraging people in their networks to apply for it. A number of stakeholder road shows took place at the end of last year to support that work, and we are planning a multimedia campaign later this month, targeting parents through television and digital advertising. I gave one example to Mark Griffin and I hope that some of the other examples that I have given to Sandra White demonstrate how seriously we are taking that issue.