Thank you, convener. I hope that the committee can hear me. I have been having some connectivity issues, so I apologise if I lose my signal at some point.
During the pandemic, the Scottish Government introduced an unprecedented level of support to ensure that we targeted new assistance to where help was, and still is, needed. We have committed more than £500 million of investment to social protection and strengthened local resilience with more than £200 million of consequential funding. Social security has played its part in that package of measures, albeit within our limitations, by which I refer not only to the fact that no income replacement benefits are devolved and that we have powers over only 15 per cent of social security spending, but to the fact that so much of the interaction on our benefits relies on access to data from the United Kingdom Government, if we are using reserved benefits for our eligibility criteria. That limits how quickly we can introduce new benefits, such as the Scottish child payment for children aged six to 16, and our options for how we respond to emergency issues during a pandemic.
Despite those constraints, the Scottish Government has come up with pragmatic and innovative solutions that have enabled us to maintain and expand our response and our use of social security. The Scottish Government has oriented its response to the pandemic in relation to the four harms: the damage caused by the virus itself, the broader impact on health and social care services, the economic harm, and the societal harm resulting from the restrictions that have been put in place to manage the spread of the virus. A broader package of measures is being deployed across the Scottish Government to address those harms and lay the groundwork for a lasting recovery. Social security is just one element of that multifaceted response, albeit a vital one.
The economic impact has been immense, from reduced wages to job losses. One impact of the pandemic has been increased demand for the support available across social security systems. I want to be clear that I commend the Department for Work and Pensions and its many staff for keeping up with the demands on its services, such as when claims for universal credit nearly doubled during lockdown when its staff were working from home. I welcome the initial changes that it made, including raising local housing allowance rates and providing a much-needed uplift to universal credit and working tax credit.
However, Covid-19 has also meant that many more people, some who have never interacted with the benefits system before, have needed to rely on social security. That has exposed and exacerbated the existing shortcomings in the current UK Government welfare system, including the five-week wait for payments, the two-child limit, the benefit cap and inadequate housing support. I have raised those issues, along with others, with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on a number of occasions since March.
I turn to the actions of the Scottish Government. Even with the disruption caused by Covid-19 and the necessary move to homeworking, everyone who relies on Scottish social security benefits has continued to be able to apply and be paid by Social Security Scotland. We are now delivering nine benefits and, despite the pandemic, in the past four months, we have introduced two entirely new benefits: the child winter heating assistance and the job start payment. Our tenth benefit, the game-changing Scottish child payment, opened for applications in November.
Recognising the extraordinary demands that are placed on carers, we also provided eligible carers with an additional coronavirus carers allowance supplement in June, meaning that, this year, carers will receive up to £690 more than carers in the rest of the UK. We increased the Scottish welfare fund by £22 million, enabling local authorities to support those who are most in need, and a further £20 million has been provided to local authorities to use as a flexible fund to tackle financial insecurity over the winter months and support people to afford essentials such as food and fuel. That money can also be used to further top up the Scottish welfare fund or discretionary housing payment allocation, which has been increased from £11 million to £19 million in addition to what we provide to mitigate the bedroom tax in full.
We also introduced the brand new social self-isolation support grant payment in October and, last week, that was expanded to include parents of children who need to isolate. Those are a just a few examples of the actions that we have taken through the pandemic and much more is outlined in the letter that I sent to the committee this week. I am happy to take questions from members.