Looking at the final results from our first vote on Welfare issues, it is clear that there is a strong desire among users of our site for most of the key welfare policy areas to be controlled by the Scottish Parliament.
In total, 753 individual users of the site cast their vote on the five questions we asked over the course of March 2014.
Although desire for Holyrood to control all the areas polled on was high, Housing Benefit received the most support from users for this area of Welfare policy to be controlled by Holyrood with 90% answering yes to the question: “should powers over housing benefits be controlled by the Scottish Parliament?” This would logically make sense to most voters, as housing is already an issue devolved to the Scottish Parliament.
This is a particularly interesting result as the idea of devolving control of Housing Benefits was one of the key elements to Scottish Labour’s recent Powers for a Purpose document where the party outlined the findings from their commission on further devolution for Scotland. This demonstrates that this is an area and proposal that the parties in Scotland know enjoys broad support from the electorate.
Although still high at 84%, support for Holyrood controlling pensions did record the lowest level of support among users of the site with 14% of users not wanting to see this area of policy under Holyrood control.
For a full breakdown and analysis of these results, please check out our Results page here: www.scotlandvotes.com/topic/welfare