Count Carer's Allowance and Carer Support Payment as Pension Credit income

[MaxGhenis]

Addresses item 1 of #1937 (item 2, the 2025-26 minimum guarantee, is fixed by #1925).

Problem

gov.dwp.pension_credit.guarantee_credit.income (the list pension_credit_income sums) left out carers_allowance and carer_support_payment. Pension-age Housing Benefit counts both (housing_benefit_applicable_income), and HB is passported to its maximum while guarantee_credit > 0. Council Tax Reduction has the same passport since #1909. So the model assessed carers on two different incomes. It paid Guarantee Credit on income without the carer's benefit. Then, the moment Guarantee Credit ended, HB and CTR were assessed on income with it.

On main (7b9fc37), a 2026 pensioner couple in England shows the cliff. Both are aged 70; the claimant has State Pension £13,500 and the partner has no State Pension, cares 35 hours a week and gets Carer's Allowance of £4,495.40. They rent from the council for £8,000 with council tax £2,000. Between private pension £9,700 and £9,800 their household net income falls by £2,455.92:

main, private pension £9,700 → £9,800
private pension less income tax	+£80.00
Guarantee Credit ends (£66.80 → 0)	−£66.80
HB passport lost; HB income now includes the £4,495.40 CA, and 65% of the £2,732.99 excess is withdrawn	−£1,776.44
CTR passport lost; 20% of the £3,463.40 excess is withdrawn	−£692.68
net income	−£2,455.92

Before #1909 gave CTR the passport, CTR fell by only its £16.00 taper, and the same step lost £1,779.24. That is the figure the commit messages cite.

Law

Texts were fetched from legislation.gov.uk on 2026-09-30, and two independent verifiers re-fetched and checked each quote.

• Carer's Allowance counts. State Pension Credit Act 2002 s.15(1)(e) makes "prescribed social security benefits" income, and s.17(1) defines social security benefits as "benefits payable under the enactments relating to social security in any part of the United Kingdom". SPC Regs 2002 reg 15(1): "all social security benefits are prescribed except" a closed list, (za)–(s). Carer's Allowance (SSCBA 1992 s.70) has never been on that list, from the 2003-10-06 text to the current one. No provision in Sch IV, V or VI disregards it.
• Savings Credit. Reg 9 excludes WTC, incapacity benefit, contribution-based JSA, SDA, maternity allowance, maintenance and contributory ESA from qualifying income. It does not exclude Carer's Allowance or Carer Support Payment, so both flow through savings_credit_income unchanged. excluded_income.yaml needs no edit.
• Carer Support Payment counts, its Scottish Carer Supplement does not.
  • Since 15 March 2026, "carer support payment" in the SPC Act s.17(1) and SPC Regs reg 1(2) means "the carer support payment component of carer support". Carer Support has three components (CSP Regs, SSI 2023/302, reg 3): the CSP component, the Scottish Carer Supplement (reg 14A: paid "for each award week in which Carer Support Payment is payable") and the Carer Additional Person Payment.
  • Reg 15(1)(ri), inserted by SI 2026/246 art 17(3) from 15.3.2026, excepts "Scottish carer supplement and carer additional person payment". HB (SPC) Regs 2006 reg 29(1)(j)(xviiha), inserted by art 21(3), does the same for Housing Benefit.
  • The supplement is taxable (ITEPA 2003 s.660 Table A, SI 2026/93).
• Sch IV para 19 disregards any CSP above the Carer's Allowance amount. It does not bind: CSP and CA are both £83.30 in 2025-26 and £86.45 in 2026-27.

PolicyEngine's carer_support_payment was (rate + supplement) × 52. Adding it to the list as it stood would have counted the supplement, which HB was already doing wrongly.

Change

• guarantee_credit/income.yaml gains carers_allowance and carer_support_payment, with the reg 15(1) and SI 2026/246 references.
• carer_support_payment is now the CSP component only, csp.rate × 52. A new Person variable scottish_carer_supplement = (carer_support_payment > 0) × csp.supplement × 52 implements reg 14A.
• scottish_carer_supplement sits next to carer_support_payment in household_benefits, hbai_benefits, hbai_household_net_income, gov_spending, pre_budget_change_household_benefits and social_security_income. Those totals are unchanged; the Enhanced FRS runs below show carer_support_payment −£72.8m and scottish_carer_supplement +£72.8m, netting to zero, in every year.
• Pension Credit and HB income, which list carer_support_payment alone, now leave the supplement out, as the law requires.

The same example on this branch:

• Guarantee Credit ends at a private pension of about £4,164, where income reaches the £21,392.80 minimum guarantee.
• Across £4,100 → £4,200, net income rises by £28.60: +£100 pension, −£20 income tax, −£51.40 Guarantee Credit. HB and CTR stay at their maximum because income of £21,421.40 is below their £22,438 applicable amount.
• At £9,700 → £9,800, net income rises by £12.00: +£100, −£20 tax, −£52 HB (65%), −£16 CTR.

Invariants

Property-tested in test_pension_credit_carer_income_properties.py. It uses Hypothesis, derandomized, with 12 examples of up to 4 families × 41 private-pension points each. The draws are single people and couples over State Pension age with one carer receiving CA (England, Wales) or CSP (Scotland), qualifying by hours or by a reported award, renting from the council in 2026.

1. Differential (PC vs HB income). Where Guarantee Credit is not paid, housing_benefit_applicable_income + housing_benefit_applicable_income_disregard == pension_credit_income. No earnings, pension contributions or capital above £10,000 are drawn.
2. Boundary. On the private-pension step where Guarantee Credit ends, household net income (excluding the TV licence, a genuine statutory cliff for over-75s) does not fall.
3. Metamorphic (reg 15(1)(ri)). Setting the Scottish Carer Supplement to zero leaves pension_credit_income + income_tax and housing_benefit_applicable_income + income_tax unchanged.

On main, invariants 1 and 2 fail; invariant 3 needs the new variable. The shrunk counterexamples:

• (1) a single carer aged 67 with a reported CA award has HB income £4,495.40 above PC income;
• (2) a single carer aged 67 with State Pension £83 loses £294.48 at private pension £16,000 → £16,500, where HB goes from £296 to £0.

All 3 pass on the branch (167 s).

Not drawn, each with a reason in the module docstring:

• Two carers in one couple. PC pays two carer additions (reg 6(8)), but HB and CTR give one carer premium until Set DWP benefit rates to the announced amounts, not CPI projections #1925 sets the couple rate to twice the single rate (HB (SPC) Sch 3 para 12: "£48.15 in respect of each person").
• Disability benefits. With a carer benefit in payment, PC withholds its severe disability addition, but the HB severe disability premium keys on a different disability test (Give pension-age HB and CTR the severe disability premium Pension Credit uses #1938).

Tests

• New tests/policy/baseline/gov/dwp/pension_credit/pension_credit_carer_income.yaml has 10 cases, with every expected value hand-derived from statutory rates.

  • CA counts, whether from caring hours or a reported award.
  • CSP counts and the supplement does not, with income tax on the supplement still charged.
  • CSP in 2025, before the supplement; CA in Scotland in 2024, before CSP.
  • CA counts as Savings Credit qualifying income: an 80-year-old carer's Savings Credit goes from nil to the £933.82 maximum.
  • The couple above at £9,700 / £9,800 and at the new boundary £4,100 / £4,200.
  • Pension-age HB counts CSP but not the supplement.
  • A working-age Scottish carer's HB income leaves the supplement out (HB Regs 2006 Sch 5 para 75), while household_benefits, HBAI benefits and net income, gov_spending, pre-budget benefits and taxable social security income all still include it.

  All 10 fail on main. The carers in these cases have no State Pension, so no overlapping-benefit adjustment applies (see Not in this PR).

• policyengine-core test policyengine_uk/tests/policy -c policyengine_uk: 1,296 passed on the first commit (main then: 1,287). On the head merged with main, 512 passed across gov/dwp, finance/benefit, gov/local_authorities and household; CI runs the whole suite.

• pytest policyengine_uk/tests/: 320 passed, 45 skipped on the first commit, run without the new property file. On the merged head, the carer, UC unearned-benefit and CTR–Pension Credit property files and the Carer Support Payment tests all pass.

Enhanced FRS impact

Real runs of main (7b9fc37) and this branch merged with it (8997374) on the Enhanced FRS 2024-25 (enhanced_frs_2024_25.h5), with totals summed in float64. Aggregates only. Runs against two earlier mains (44240bd, 38f85fe) gave the same changes.

£m	2025	2026	2027	2028	2029	2030
Pension Credit (main: £6,226m in 2025, £6,989m in 2026)	−3.78	−3.94	−4.05	−4.14	−4.24	−4.35
Housing Benefit	0	+0.10	+0.10	+0.10	+0.10	+0.10
Targeted childcare entitlement (see below)	−1.59	0	0	−1.73	−1.77	−1.82
Household benefits = household net income	−5.37	−3.84	−3.95	−5.78	−5.92	−6.07

• Pension Credit:
  • All of the change is Guarantee Credit, among benefit units with a carer's benefit: about 880 weighted units in 2026.
  • Each unit's Guarantee Credit falls by its Carer's Allowance, £4,495.40 a year in 2026.
  • No unit gains or loses Pension Credit entitlement, so the TV licence and PC-passported benefits do not move.
  • Savings Credit and Scotland's Pension Credit are unchanged: the data has no State Pension age CSP recipients.
• Housing Benefit: +£0.10m for about 120 weighted Scottish benefit units receiving CSP. 65% of the £608.40-a-year supplement per carer no longer counts as income.
• Targeted childcare entitlement moves because its qualifying list (gov.dfe.targeted_childcare_entitlement.qualifying_benefits) uses the computed guarantee_credit, which is positive for working-age families. In law the parent must be "entitled to ... the guaranteed element of state pension credit" (SI 2014/2147 reg 1, "eligible child"), and entitlement needs the qualifying age (SPCA 2002 s.1(2)(b)). With CA counted, some working-age carer families with a 2-year-old lose that computed Guarantee Credit and with it the entitlement. So the change moves toward the law; the underlying bug is Targeted childcare qualifies working-age families through a computed Guarantee Credit #1956.
• Unchanged in 2026: income tax, Council Tax Reduction, UC, the TV licence, poverty (BHC 14.54%, AHC 18.79%; pensioners 11.94% / 10.82%) and deep poverty.
• 2026 budget: gov_spending −£3.84m, gov_balance +£3.84m.
• pension_credit_income rises for 1.19m weighted benefit units with a carer's benefit, mostly working-age units, whose computed Guarantee Credit is not paid. Only the 876 units above receive Pension Credit.

Scripts and outputs: dataset_impact.py, compare_impact.py and decompose.py (per-benefit decomposition for 2025, 2028, 2029 and 2030), kept outside the repo.

Not in this PR

• Overlapping benefits. Reg 15(3)-(4)(a) and (g) count CA and CSP after the Overlapping Benefits Regs 1979 (reg 12: CA is reduced by State Pension) and CSP Regs reg 16(2) reductions. PolicyEngine pays CA and CSP in full alongside State Pension. For pension-age carers whose State Pension overlaps, the model overstates CA and, now that PC counts it, understates Guarantee Credit by the same amount. Net income is never further from the law than on main, and it is exact whenever Guarantee Credit covers the carer's benefit. With SP = State Pension, MG = minimum guarantee and CA = Carer's Allowance:

  	net income vs law
  main	+CA
  this PR	between 0 and +CA; 0 when MG − SP ≥ CA

  In the Enhanced FRS, CA is paid only to people who report receiving it. Carer's Allowance and Carer Support Payment ignore the overlapping-benefit reduction by State Pension #1953 will model the reduction.

• Other income the law counts but the list still omits: IIDB, SDA, the AFCS guaranteed income payment, incapacity benefit, maternity allowance, spousal maintenance, sublet income, and SSP/SMP as earnings. Also: the Savings Credit exclusions (reg 9) lack WTC; Sch VI earnings disregards are not applied; and PC income deducts tax on income it does not count (reg 17(10)). Pension Credit income still omits IIDB, SDA, the AFCS guaranteed income payment and other countable income #1954 tracks these.

• UC does not count CSP (UC Regs reg 66(1)(b)(iiia)); that is in progress separately. Scottish CTR does not count CSP either (SSI 2021/249 reg 57(1)(b)(iva); SSI 2012/319 reg 27(1)(j)); see Scottish Council Tax Reduction income omits Carer Support Payment #1955. After this PR, adding carer_support_payment to those lists is correct as it stands, because it no longer includes the supplement.

• The supplement rate has no uprating metadata, so the model holds it flat from 2027 (Scottish Carer Supplement rate has no uprating #1957).

• Give pension-age HB and CTR the severe disability premium Pension Credit uses #1938's property docstring says Pension Credit income leaves out Carer's Allowance; that becomes stale when this merges.

• The HB reg 27 savings-credit-only route (in progress) reads pension_credit_income, so it inherits this fix.

• Downstream: carer_support_payment now means the CSP component, following SI 2026/246's redefinition. A new .added changelog fragment says so, and this is a minor version bump.

  • Anything that sums benefits by name must add scottish_carer_supplement.
  • In PolicyEngine repos, only this package names the variable.
  • In Axiom, axiom-oracles (bridges/efrs_uk.py, bridges/mappings/uk.yaml), axiom-encode (oracles/policyengine/mappings/uk.yaml) and axiom-corpus (concepts/data/uk.yaml) map rulespec-uk's carer_support_payment_annual_amount to carer_support_payment. That rulespec-uk amount includes the supplement (98.15 a week), so the oracle will show a £608.40 gap per Scottish carer until the mapping or the module is split. Step 3 of Encode SPC Regs 2002 reg 15(1), (3) and (4) (Carer's Allowance and Carer Support Payment count as Pension Credit income; the Scottish Carer Supplement does not) and take the PC pipeline's income from it TheAxiomFoundation/rulespec-uk#390 covers it.

axiom: TheAxiomFoundation/rulespec-uk#390 queued

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[vahid-ahmadi]

Reviewed: approve with nits.

Counting Carer's Allowance and the Carer Support Payment component as Pension Credit income is right. Reg 15(1) prescribes all social security benefits except a closed list, and CA is not on it. Reg 15(1)(ri) (SI 2026/246 art 17(3), from 15.3.2026) excepts only the Scottish Carer Supplement and the carer additional person payment, so splitting scottish_carer_supplement out is the correct fix. It also removes an existing HB over-count. Counting CA as income alongside the carer addition is the statutory design, not double counting.

1. Should fix (description): the description includes record-level survey details that should be removed. Small weighted unit counts in the Pension Credit and HB impact bullets can each correspond to one or two survey records. Please round them heavily or drop them, and keep the £m aggregates.
2. Nit: the HB impact line (+£0.10m) is about twice what 65% × £608.40 per affected unit implies. Please reconcile, for example two carers per unit or rounding.
3. Nit: test_pension_credit_carer_income_properties.py, invariant 3. Asserting that pension_credit_income + income_tax is unchanged builds in the known deviation that PC income deducts tax on income PC does not count (Pension Credit income still omits IIDB, SDA, the AFCS guaranteed income payment and other countable income #1954). Please say in the docstring that the invariant is weakened for that reason.
4. Nit: carer_support_payment changes meaning. Add a .changed fragment as well as .added, so downstream users see it in the release notes.
5. Nit: the overlapping-benefit gap is correctly scoped out to Carer's Allowance and Carer Support Payment ignore the overlapping-benefit reduction by State Pension #1953. Please land Carer's Allowance and Carer Support Payment ignore the overlapping-benefit reduction by State Pension #1953 before publishing any pension-age-carer analysis.

Verified: I read reg 15(1), including (ra) and (ri) and the SI 2026/246 annotation. I did not independently fetch reg 9; I relied on the PR's reading. Locally, the 10 new YAML cases and the 3 properties pass. Rates reproduce: CSP 83.30 / 86.45 × 52 and supplement 11.70 × 52, held flat from 2027 as documented (#1957). The branch merges cleanly with #1951 and #1977. On a #1977 + #1952 merge, 184 YAML cases and 5 CSP pytest tests pass. CI run 36772855090 passed all six jobs.