Social Justice and Social Security Committee 11 December 2025
Social Security Scotland has its own teams, and they will go into homes and help people to fill in paperwork and so on. That is not exclusive to people with disabilities. The purpose of my meeting David Wallace is to ensure that the front-line people at Social Security Scotland understand that an independent service is available, which sits outside Social Security Scotland. That is important.
We need to understand when it would be better for Social Security Scotland staff to deal with an inquiry rather than our doing so. It is a matter of letting people know that we are here and of making referrals easy. We have a lot of experience with the fuel insecurity fund, for example. We work with partners the length and breadth of Scotland. Those arrangements made engagement with us easy. Everybody in the third sector and in the public sector is busy, and if we make it too hard to engage, people will not engage. They will either look for an alternative route or they will just ignore the issue. We will be making it easy to engage, including for people who want to self-refer.
We are getting in-house help from the team at the Forth Valley Sensory Centre, and they will give us observations about how the service could be improved for people with sight issues and hearing issues. We want to make it easy for people to engage with us, because that is key.
Some people will want remote engagement anyway. There has been a big change since Covid, as we have seen on our dashboards. People who once would have opted for a face-to-face service now opt for an online one. We are not here to judge whether someone should receive the service online or face to face: if they want face to face, we will aim to deliver a face-to-face service.