I am very conscious of time, but I will make a couple of remarks.
Thank you for the opportunity to give evidence to the committee. The privilege of being the chief executive of Social Security Scotland means that I have had lots of firsts—the first payments and so on—and this is my first formal appearance in front of the committee.
I will touch on a couple of issues very briefly, given the time and because I know that there are some areas that the committee would like to explore. I will cover where we are as an organisation and how we have got there. I will also say a bit about the culture of the organisation that we are trying to build and about the information that we expect to generate to help the committee’s scrutiny of our performance.
As members are aware, Social Security Scotland opened for business in September last year with the carers allowance supplement—and I will stop there on the carers allowance supplement. We employ just over 300 staff, most of whom are based in our headquarters in Dundee and Glasgow, although we also have a small cohort of staff operating across Scotland in preparation for face-to-face local delivery.
A huge amount of work went into getting ready for the launch. I am conscious that some members have visited the programme to see some of the complexity behind what is being achieved. Alison Byrne is from the programme side of the Scottish Government, and we continue to work incredibly closely with our programme, directorate and chief digital officer colleagues to achieve what we need to achieve.
I will mention some key points in the agency’s history. In March 2016, “Creating a Fairer Scotland: A New Future for Employability Support in Scotland” was published, and that was our “there will be an agency” moment. I joined the directorate shortly after that and my remit was to make that agency happen. The statement in Parliament in April 2017 referred to our outline business case, which is published and which gives a lot of detail about how the agency will operate, including the face-to-face delivery. That was the first time that we set out that the agency would likely employ 1,500 people across the two sites and what its high-level operating model would be.
In May 2017, Angela Constance, the then Cabinet Secretary for Communities, Social Security and Equalities, announced that the carers allowance supplement would be the first benefit that we would deliver and when we would deliver it.
Swiftly after that, in September 2017, again in evidence that was published in Parliament, we explained our decision to set up in Dundee and Glasgow. I am really quite proud to say that, one year on from that, in September 2018, and essentially from a standing start in the city of Dundee, we were able to deliver the carers allowance supplement, as you have been debating, and put money into the pockets of people in Scotland.
We have been playing a key role in ensuring that our workforce is diverse and reflects society broadly, as well as the clients we want to serve. I am aware that some members have visited Dundee to see that approach in action. That is not just our ethos; there are practical measures behind that. For example, we run job adverts past stakeholders as we develop them, to try to ensure that there are no language barriers to applying for our jobs. We have removed minimum qualifications for our entry-level jobs, which has allowed us to attract people into the organisation whom the civil service would not otherwise have been able to employ. That gives us a real ability to expand our workforce.
We have also been really determined to offer people continuous feedback throughout our employment processes. I am delighted to say that we have people working in Dundee who were originally unsuccessful in applying to the organisation, but as a result of the work that we have done with them, they have been successfully employed. We are trying to embed that approach in everything that we do.
That also applies to our executive advisory body. Our advisory body and our non-executives have a broad range of experience and skills relating to the people whom we serve. Again, that is a conscious move on which we are trying to deliver.
Through the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018 and the charter, we are building in continuous service feedback from our clients. We will do that in a number of ways as services come on stream. We may come on to discuss that in more detail, but I am delighted to say that, so far, the feedback from clients on the services that we have delivered has been remarkably positive. We are very pleased with that.
At a more general level, we will start publishing more information on the benefit payments that we make and the impact that they are starting to have. A set of official statistics has recently been released on the carers allowance supplement. Although you are probably aware of them, I will give you the high-level figures. More than 77,000 payments of the carers allowance supplement were made in the first tranche. As you have been discussing, that gave more than £17 million of money to carers in Scotland that would not otherwise have been paid. We are incredibly proud of that. The next set of figures on the carers allowance supplement will be released in May.
Over the coming period and into April, we will produce official statistics on the best start grant. We have given early indications about how the best start grant process has worked, but we will push out official statistics in order for you to get a better feel for that.
I will also say, in terms of scrutiny and transparency, that we will of course produce an annual report and accounts. This year will be a part-year set of accounts, covering from our launch in September 2018 until the end of March 2019. James Wallace would be happy to cover those elements. We are in discussion with Audit Scotland about what that report might look like.
I hope that that has given you a flavour of some of our activity and where we are currently. I am happy to take questions.