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 CAS on each of the eligibility dates. It then securely transfers the necessary data to Social Security Scotland to allow them to make CAS 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 CAS 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 CAS for one or more periods of eligibility as determined by the data transfer.

The April 2018 eligibility date scan was run in August 2018, and the October 2018 eligibility date scan was run in November 2018.

To take account of backdating, these data include those found to be eligible from the April 2018 eligibility date scan, as well as those identified in the October 2018 eligibility scan as having retrospective entitlement for April 2018. Future scans may identify additional people who are retrospectively entitled to CAS for the April 2018 eligibility date, therefore there may be a small undercount in this data.

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 CAS 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 at https://www2.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Social-Welfare/SocialSecurityforScotland/CASOct2018

and DWP at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/dwp-statistical-summaries.

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

• Reference date – CAS data refers to 16 April 2018, while Carer’s Allowance data refers to May 2018.

• Backdating – CAS data is taken from scans carried out in August and November 2018, and therefore currently includes seven months 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 CAS. 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:

https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/jsf/login.xhtml

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. These can be found at https://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Social-Welfare/SocialSecurityforScotland