The Scottish Government does not request information from applicants regarding their carer status. We therefore have no figures on this.

A debt management service will be in place within Social Security Scotland when it is established.

Chapters 5 and 6 of Part 2 of the Act are only relevant to the assistance listed in Chapter 2 of that Part and Part 3. Once a decision has been taken to commence the relevant sections Parliament will be advised by the laying of commencement regulations.

Scottish Government does not hold information on how many staff it has unsuccessfully attempted to procure under the Temp and Interim Staff Services Framework Agreements.

947 panel members have not engaged in the Experience Panels beyond the initial recruitment stage. It was made clear at the recruitment stage that members could participate as much or as little as they like.

For every piece of Experience Panels research we offer multiple channels for participation to account for different participation needs, including online, phone and face to face options. Our most recent survey has asked panel members for feedback about what is working well, and how we can improve our approach to engaging panel members. We are also working with key stakeholders to increase our engagement with these groups in our next large scale piece of research, and are reviewing non-participation to ascertain if there is anything further we can do.

As with all projects of this type, some panel members will choose not to engage preferring instead to simply be informed of what is happening, and a small number have opted to leave the panel. We will continue to recruit panel members on an annual basis to account for this.

120 meetings have been held with the Experience Panels, other than the About Your Benefits and You survey. This includes benefits specific design work and cross cutting design for the new agency. This work is ongoing with further meetings planned.

20 communications have been sent to experience panel members, or groups within the experience panel about our research and opportunities to take part, beyond the About Your Benefits and You survey and focus groups.

This does not include follow up communications or communication with individual panel members on a one to one basis.

The information requested is set out in the following table.

As of 14 June 2018 we have received 132 expense claims from Experience Panel members. All have been processed and reimbursed.

As far as possible we limit upfront costs for panel members by booking taxis for them where possible, meeting locally, providing options for participating by telephone, and by providing refreshments and lunch for face-to-face events.

88 taxi journeys have been booked in Edinburgh, and 71 taxi journeys have been booked in Glasgow.

Experience Panels expense claims are received by the Scottish Government Experience panels research team either directly from panel members at events, or sent in via a First Class FREEPOST service. Once completed forms are received in the office they are usually sent to finance to be processed within one working day.

From June 2017 to December 2017 Experience Panels expense claims were handled by Scottish Government central finance. The average processing time for these claims was 3.4 days.

Since 5 December 2017 Experience Panels expense claims are handled by the Social Security agency finance team. The average processing time for these claims is 3 working days.

All 130 claims apart from 3 were paid within 4 working days. The maximum processing time from receiving a completed form for these three outliers was 36 days. These three outliers were due to incomplete information or errors. We are continuing to trial potential improvements to our processes to reduce the time it takes for payments to be made.