The powers relating to social security devolved to the Scottish Parliament by the Scotland Act 2016 have been utilised at scale, with Social Security Scotland now responsible for delivering more than a dozen different benefits in Scotland. 1 Though the governing law remains the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018, the regime of devolved social security has recently been tweaked. In the Social Security (Amendment) (Scotland) Act 2025, the Scottish Parliament created a regulation-making power which will be used in time to modify the legal basis of the Scottish Child Payment (SCP), the most prominent of the new devolved benefits. This note considers that change in the context of a discussion of how social security was devolved (in part) to the Scottish Parliament and the manner in which the devolved competence has been deployed in the intervening years. Against that background, it comments on the operation of the so-called ‘shared powers’ model of devolution which applies to social security.
Paul F. Scott (Mon,) studied this question.