THE SNP Government has put off taking control of new welfare powers until 2020 because it fears another IT fiasco could leave claimants short of money, Nicola Sturgeon said yesterday.
The First Minister told MSPs the timescale was based on “significant lessons” her government had learned from recent Scottish computer disasters affecting farm payments and NHS24.
The Scottish Government was accused of hypocrisy at the weekend after it emerged it had asked the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to keep delivering benefits which are being devolved to Holyrood for a further three years.
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The untested arrangement, known as “split competence”, will see Holyrood acquire “legislative competence” over a range of benefits from 2017, allowing Holyrood to pass a bill establishing a new Scottish Social Security Agency.
However, at their request, Scottish Ministers will not acquire “executive competence” to deliver most of the benefits until 2020.
Until then, the DWP will continue to deliver disability benefits, carers’ allowance, industrial injury payments and maternity, funeral and heating expenses, despite SNP MPs and MSPs regularly criticising the DWP for the quality of its service.
At her annual Q&A before the conveners of Holyrood’s committees, Ms Sturgeon said claims of unforeseen delays were “absolute utter nonsense”.
However she said: “Around IT we have significant lessons to learn from the experience over the CAP system and the NHS24 system.
“There’s a relationship between that and the responsibility we have to put a delivery system in place for social security payments.
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“There is a monumental amount of work going on in the Scottish Government just now to make sure those lessons are learned and applied to the future.”
She said it was a massive, complex task to get the new IT systems right, with Scottish systems having to dovetail with DWP ones that were “disjointed” and “pretty antiquated”.
An an example, she cited cold weather payments which currently rely on 11 DWP IT systems, each one of which would have to be amended to identify Scottish recipients.
She said: “We want to get these powers up and running as quickly as possible, but the absolute driving priority is to deliver them safely and securely.
“When this system is fully up and running, it will deliver more payments per week than the Scottish Government currently delivers in total every year.
“That’s the scale of it. It will deliver payments to 1.4million people. One in four of the Scottish population. That scale is massive. We cannot take responsibility for delivering these systems until we have the delivery mechanism in place that we are confident can deliver.”
Started in 2011, NHS24’s future programme was supposed to integrate its telephone and online service by mid-2013, but it was hit by delays and cost overruns.
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After two abortive launches in late 2015, it was withdrawn from service and is still on hold.
An Audit Scotland report last month said it was currently 73 per over budget, at £131m.
Equally over-budget is the IT system which was meant to handle EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) payments to farmers but left nearly 20,000 without the subsidy they were due.
Earlier this year, Audit Scotland said the £178m system had suffered “serious cost and operational issues” and was unlikely to deliver value for money.
The Scottish Government yesterday announced extra funding for Citizens Advice Bureaux to support people needing extra help with funeral payments, one of the benefits ministers have promised to speed up when they take control of it in 2020.
Labour MSP Neil Findlay said earlier this week social security minister Jeanne Freeman had a “brass neck” after telling voters an independent Scotland could be delivered in 18 months when it “ cannot even administer 11 benefits within the next three years”.
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