Received applications, authorised applications and issued payments for Funeral Support Payment
| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Funeral Support Payment Indicator | |
| Measure Type | |
| Reference Period |
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Reference Area
(showing types of area available in these data) |
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Entire dataset
Note: These may be large files. |
CSVN-Triples |
The Funeral Support Payment is a single payment to help with the costs of a funeral. It replaced the Department for Work and Pensions’ Funeral Expense Payment in Scotland on the 16 September 2019. Applications were taken from this same day.
This dataset includes received applications, authorised applications and issued payments for the Funeral Support Payment benefit. Statistics are provided for the last day of the month (e.g. figures for 2019-09 are for applications received or authorised as of 30 September 2019).
Further information on application, processing times, redeterminations and appeals can be found in the associated publication
Figures have been rounded to the nearest five for disclosure control. Some values are missing from this dataset. These values have been suppressed where they would disclose fewer than five applications.
The data used to produce these statistics are extracted from the Social Security case management system. Extracts from this system are also used on a daily basis for internal reporting within Social Security Scotland. As such, the data is checked daily for consistency with previous extracts (i.e. do applications, decisions and payments figures increase as expected over time, and are they in proportion to each other) and compared to other sources of information such as the number of payment instructions reported by the finance team.
Quality assurance and cleaning has been carried out on the variables used in the official statistics:
Once the data is aggregated and copied into the publication and supporting Excel tables, the final statistics are quality assured by a different member of the statistics team.
1) Rounding and disclosure control
Application and outcome figures have been rounded to the nearest five for disclosure control. Data has been suppressed where it would disclose fewer than five applications.
2) Missing and duplicate applications
The data comes from 100% data cut of the case management system. The data cut contained a small proportion of applications where the fields relating to application date and the outcome and payment of the application were blank. These applications represent temporary ‘prospect cases’, which are created when clients contact Social Security Scotland without a National Insurance number, and are later replaced once a National Insurance number is received from the applicant. These applications are therefore duplicates and have been excluded from the statistics.
Clients may make repeated applications to Funeral Support Payment in certain circumstances. For instance, if their initial application is withdrawn or denied. This means that there can be several applications from the same client in the data cut. For this publication we have retained all of these applications.
3) Geography
Applications are assigned to local authority by postcode using a Scottish Government lookup file. For some applications, the postcode will not match to the lookup file. This can be because the postcode is not in a Scottish local authority, or because the postcode has been introduced too recently to appear on the lookup file, for example if a property is in a new development. For postcodes that could not be matched to a Scottish local authority, the postcode area was used to check whether the postcode was in Scotland or elsewhere. Non-matching postcodes from Scottish border postcode areas (postcodes starting ‘DG’ and ‘TD’) were also checked individually and assigned to Scottish local authorities or as ‘non-Scottish postcodes’ manually.
Following these checks on postcodes, in this publication a small proportion of applications did not include address information and therefore could not be matched to a local authority or country.
Figures for the applications that did not match to Scottish local authorities and health boards are provided in the official statistics publication tables.
Department for Work and Pensions publish information about Funeral Expense Payment in the Social Fund annual report 2022 to 2023.
Department for Work and Pensions also publishes annual expenditure for Funeral Expense Payments at Great Britain level in their Benefit expenditure and caseload tables.
Further information on application, processing times, redeterminations and appeals can be found in the associated publication
These statistics are used by a wide range of interested parties, such as:
They are used for a wide range of purposes including:
These statistics are updated every 3 months. These updates coincide with our quarterly publications on Funeral Support Payment. These can be found at the Social Security Scotland website.
Data are collected, validated and published in as timely a manner as possible in accordance with the Statistics Code of Practice. Data are published quarterly and can be found on the Scottish Government website.
Revisions and corrections to previously published statistics are dealt with in accordance with the Scottish Government Statistician Group corporate policy statement on revisions and corrections.
This is a linked data resource: it has a permanent unique uri at which both humans and machines can find it on the Internet, and which can be used an identifier in queries on our SPARQL endpoint.
A linked data-orientated view of dimensions and values
| Dimension | Locked Value |
|---|---|
|
Funeral Support Payment Indicator
http://statistics.gov.scot/def/dimension/funeralSupportPaymentIndicator
|
(not locked to a value) |
|
Reference Area
http://purl.org/linked-data/sdmx/2009/dimension#refArea
|
(not locked to a value) |
|
Reference Period
http://purl.org/linked-data/sdmx/2009/dimension#refPeriod
|
(not locked to a value) |
|
Measure Type
http://purl.org/linked-data/cube#measureType
|
(not locked to a value) |
Linked Data is stored in graphs. We keep dataset contents (the data) separately from the metadata, to make it easier for you to find exactly what you need.
The data in this dataset are stored in the graph: http://statistics.gov.scot/graph/funeral-support-payment-applications-and-payments
The data structure definition for this data cube dataset is stored in the same graph as the data: http://statistics.gov.scot/graph/funeral-support-payment-applications-and-payments
All other metadata about this dataset are stored in the graph: http://statistics.gov.scot/graph/funeral-support-payment-applications-and-payments/metadata
A breakdown by type of the 185 resources in this dataset's data graph.
| Resource type | Number of resources |
|---|---|
| Collection | 2 |
| Component specification | 7 |
| Data set | 1 |
| Data structure definition | 1 |
| Observation | 174 |
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