Erica Young on the importance of easy access to Adult Disability Payment (ADP)

Living with a disability or long-term health condition has perhaps never felt more challenging for people in Scotland.

After years of austerity, the pandemic and the current perma-crisis, all too often disabled people are forced to endure the worst of not only systems failure but also the growth in rhetoric that dehumanises people, deterring them from seeking the support that they need.  

It’s in this context that we need to ensure that disabled people have full access to disability-related social security payments here in Scotland, namely the Adult Disability Payment (ADP). This is essential to enabling disabled people to live decent and dignified lives.  

The Citizens Advice network in Scotland is the largest independent provider of ADP advice outside of Social Security Scotland (SSS), providing holistic support across the whole country to people who need it. In the last quarter (July to September) alone, our network gave almost 20,000 pieces of advice about the Daily Living Component of ADP to almost 8500 people, with ADP advice representing nearly a fifth (20%) of all the social security advice we provided. 

This advice plays an indispensable role in ensuring that people can realise their right to social security. From July to September our advisers secured ADP entitlements worth more than £6.5 million. Our evidence shows that this money is life-changing, helping people to have a better quality of life. 

These successes don’t come without challenges. Applying for any social security payment can feel both daunting and overwhelming. But perhaps none more so than disability payments as people wrestle with sharing intimate details about their personal lives and face the reality of putting downing in black and white what their disability or health condition means that they cannot do.  

The criteria used to assess how much ADP someone can be awarded are identical to those used to assess eligibility for the reserved Personal Independence Payment (PIP). These criteria must be modernised. Evidence from across our network shows that they don’t consider the wider context of a person’s life or fully capture their needs. Furthermore, the criteria don’t consider the potential role of extra costs support in improving outcomes for people, an important measure to assess if a payment is needed and at what level.  

Specialist advisers in local CABs do incredible work supporting people applying for ADP, but it is challenging. Social Security Scotland offers only one contact number to initiate and manage all social security payments, causing extensive wait times (up to three hours). Lengthy menu options cause further challenges to successfully navigating the system. Additional communication routes, such as escalation routes for advisers, referral routes to the local delivery service and callback request services would significantly improve advisers' ability to navigate the system better and get more people the help that they need.  

There is a real opportunity to make these and other improvements by implementing the recommendations of the Independent Review of ADP, which was completed this summer. We urge the Scottish Government to implement in full all of the recommendations and – crucially - to guarantee the investment that’s needed to make the system inclusive and accessible. 

Erica Young is part of the Social Justice team at Citizens Advice Scotland.

This column was first published in the Herald.