Alex Neil, the Scottish social justice secretary, said the agency will run 11 benefits being devolved to Holyrood including disability living and attendance allowances, and winter fuel payments, including the effective abolition of the bedroom tax.
There would also be reviews of whether the aggregates levy, which is now devolved to Scotland, benefits devolved areas sufficiently; reforms to how VAT is claimed back by government departments after an embarrassing row over a VAT bill for Police Scotland; and efforts to boost oil and gas decommissioning industries.
Its report said: "If Scotland becomes independent, or if benefits policy is devolved to Scotland within the United Kingdom, there would also be an opportunity for its government to reconsider a number of recent poorly-designed reforms.
The commission also said housing benefit should be devolved to Holyrood, allowing MSPs to scrap the UK government's controversial under occupancy charge, branded the "bedroom tax" by Labour and other critics.
Powers over the following benefits in Scotland will be devolved to the Scottish Parliament: Benefits for carers, disabled people and those who are ill: Attendance Allowance, Carer's Allowance, Disability Living Allowance (DLA, Personal Independencee Payment (PIP), Industrial Injuries Disablement Allowance and Severe Disablement Allowance.
This will allow the patient to be automatically fast-tracked to the highest rate of disability benefits when they are devolved to the Scottish Parliament.
He added: "We now know that powers over disability benefits are going to be devolved to Scotland in 2018, and it is highly likely that the system will then be changed again.
On the Work Programme, the report concludes that the scheme is especially failing mentally ill people, and the task of helping those on employment support allowance – the main disability benefit – to find work should be devolved to local authorities, with councils recouping some of the possible savings from the Department for Work and Pensions.
These group budgets may be devolved to each surgery, with the benefits of any efficiency savings being used to benefit that surgery's patients.
From the early 1970s, conservation bureaucrats in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Botswana (and also Zambia) argued that it was unfair that only white farmers should benefit from wildlife and that, if similar rights were devolved to communal areas, both rural people and wildlife would benefit (Metcalfe 1993).
