This data contains no sensitive, personal information.

DWP holds information on those in payment of Carer’s Allowance, and it runs a scan of this data twice a year to identify those eligible for Carer's Allowance Supplement on each of the eligibility dates. Scans are run around six weeks after each eligibility date. It then securely transfers the necessary data to Social Security Scotland to allow them to make Carer's Allowance Supplement payments.

In some instances, payment of Carer’s Allowance can be backdated, which may mean that someone who did not receive Carer’s Allowance on the eligibility date is later considered to have been eligible on that date. In order to capture these people, each scan of the DWP data will identify people who have retrospective entitlement to earlier eligibility dates, as well as identifying those in receipt of Carer’s Allowance on the most recent eligibility date. Social Security Scotland will then pay Carer's Allowance Supplement for one or more periods of eligibility as determined by the data transfer.

To take account of backdating, each eligibility scan identifies those people that have retrospective entitlement for previous Carer’s Allowance Supplement eligibility dates. The data in this publication includes those found to be eligible during the latest scan for any of the eligibility dates from April 2018 onwards. The statistics for the latest eligibility date will not include retrospective entitlement until the next eligibility scan. Future scans may continue to identify additional people who are retrospectively entitled for any previous eligibility date. Because of this, there may be an undercount for the latest eligibility date, and smaller undercounts for earlier eligibility dates.

Gender data are based on ‘title’. Title was supplied for every carer. ‘Unknown’ gender includes carers with titles where gender cannot be identified, i.e. 'Dr', 'Rev' and 'Captain'.

Age is based on age at the eligibility date. In a very small number of cases age band is ‘unknown’.

A small number of carers have ‘unknown’ local authority due to their supplied postcodes not matching the postcode address file used for statistical analysis. These 'unknown' values are included in the Scotland value.

Payments figures have been rounded to the nearest five, and expenditure figures to the nearest £1,000 for disclosure control. The percent of payments are displayed to one decimal place.

Due to the inclusion of ‘unknown’ local authorities and rounding, the sum of local authority values do not sum to the Scotland value.

The eligibility for Carer's Allowance Supplement is dependent on a person being in payment of Carer’s Allowance on the eligibility date. The data is therefore similar to the Carer’s Allowance statistics published by the Scottish Government.

and DWP.

However, there are a number of differences between these two sets of data. The key differences are:

• Reference date – Carer’s Allowance Supplement data refers to eligibility dates which are in mid-April or mid-October each year. Carer’s Allowance data refers to the end of February, May, August or November each year.

• Backdating – Carer’s Allowance Supplement data is taken from scans carried out around six weeks after each eligibility date, except for the April 2018 eligibility date where the scan was run in August 2018. Therefore the April 2018 data has more than seven months of backdating and all other data has one month of backdating. Carer’s Allowance data includes up to four months of backdating.

• Eligibility – all those who receive a payment of Carer’s Allowance on the eligibility date will receive Carer's Allowance Supplement. This will include eligible carers who subsequently become entitled to a payment, including cases which may have temporarily been suspended from payment. DWP data will exclude those who are later found to be ineligible for Carer’s Allowance as part of their backdating adjustments.

• Geography – DWP use different postcode address files to identify those who receive Carer’s Allowance who are living in Scottish postcodes.

The Carer’s Allowance data is available in more detail on Stat-Xplore, where you can access data at lower geographies e.g. Local Authority, Census Output Area, Scottish and Westminster Parliamentary Constituencies.

These statistics are updated twice a year, once for each eligibility date. These updates coincide with our quarterly publications on people in receipt of Carer’s Allowance.

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 - a copy of which is available on the Scottish Government website.