We are pleased to publish our 2016-17 annual report today about our first year of running the new Scottish Welfare Fund independent review scheme.
The report highlights that we:
- helped 1,078 people and handled 437 reviews
- improved the accessibility of the scheme by ensuring people could apply for a review by phone
- exceeded our performance targets for timeliness and the quality of our decisions
Applicants are some of the most vulnerable in society, and as such we have made accessibility a key focus of our work. We saw a 26% increase in the number of crisis grant reviews received compared to the previous year, and we believe this is likely to be in large part due to our service being accessible by phone.
In 2017-18 we are focusing some resources on learning from SWF decisions and reviews. We hope that this will allow us to work more closely with councils to further analyse our findings, and to identify recurrent issues in order to bring about improvements.
To download the full report, please visit our dedicated Scottish Welfare Fund website.