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Project Scottish Child Payment and PAWHP by September CPI - #2575
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UK hub handoff — Scottish September CPI follow-up F2. Do not merge. Head
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The award formulas annualise with policyengine-core's 52-week constant, not 365.25/7, so April 2027's £29.20/week is £1,518.40 a year and 2028's £29.80/week is £1,549.60. The baby-bonus reform cases' ordinary-rate children now read the September-CPI projection (£29.80 in 2028) rather than the SFC forecast's £29.45. Independent review P1 findings 1 and 2. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Brings in #2557 (the base this PR was stacked on, now merged) so the PR workflow runs against main. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Aggregate impact on certified data: passBase Checks: 0 broken by this change, 1 failing on both sides, 0 fixed. Moves flagged for review: 1 (thresholds in Notes
Moves flagged for review
Spending by benefit and service
Caseloads
Government balance, each component counted once
Model totals
Household income totals
Poverty rates
People in poverty
Inequality
Mean household net income in each side's own deciles
Standard reform costings (change in gov_balance)
Standard reforms: change in each reform's target
Household net income by decileMean change in household net income per household, and as a share of the decile's base income; households stay in the base run's deciles.
No change in any year: receipts by tax head; population. Checks failing on both base and head (1)
Counted-once checkEach of 84 components was raised by £1 per unit in 2026-27, and every head of its totals was read household by household: its own head must rise by exactly £1, no other tax head may move, no other benefit may rise, and the model's own total must move by what its heads moved. A head that breaks a rule is measured again twice: with every other head held at its baseline value, and with every other head held at its value after the first £1 while the component rises again. It fails where either still shows the response. 0 failed; 0 were skipped. Provenance
Dataset: Receipts by tax head: head levels
Spending by benefit and service: head levels
Caseloads: head levels
Government balance, each component counted once: head levels
Model totals: head levels
Household income totals: head levels
Population: head levels
Poverty rates: head levels
People in poverty: head levels
Inequality: head levels
Mean household net income in each side's own deciles: head levels
Standard reform costings (change in gov_balance): head levels
Standard reforms: change in each reform's target: head levels
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Merged by the UK hub (Claude session 8e19f9d5) at head
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What and why
Projects Scottish Child Payment (SCP) and all five Pension Age Winter Heating Payment (PAWHP) amounts by the previous September's CPI through
gov.benefit_uprating_cpi, with annual nearest-5p rounding each April.Base: open PR #2557, branch
benefit-uprating-september-cpi, head9f2ebfc829684052b526b06874f3c6f725ec608d. This PR is stacked on it and must follow it; no changes to #2557's branch.SCP's explicit 2027–2030 SFC January 2026 forecasts are removed. They predate the September 2026 CPI outturn and would otherwise override the projection (2027 £28.85 versus £29.20). These are projections, not enacted Scottish 2027 rates. Published values through April 2026 remain unchanged. PAWHP moves from same-year calendar CPI to the same September index.
Law and practice
The 2026–27 Scottish uprating report describes September CPI and nearest-5p rounding. Section 3 expressly calls September CPI current policy, kept under review. Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018 s86A(5) leaves “relevant prices” to Ministers; s86B supplies the uprating duty and rounding discretion. September CPI is ministerial practice, not a statutorily prescribed index.
The published anchors corroborate this practice: 2025–26 uses 1.7% (SCP £26.70 → £27.15; PAWHP £300 → £305.10 and £200 → £203.40); 2026–27 uses 3.8% (SCP £28.20; PAWHP £316.70 / £211.15 / £158.35 / £105.55).
April 2027 projections
Independent calculation: each enacted 2026 amount × 1.035, rounded to the nearest £0.05. Each later April compounds the previous rounded amount.
For SCP, £28.20 × 1.035 = £29.187 → £29.20, versus the superseded £28.85 forecast: +£0.35 a week per eligible child (about £18.26 per model year). April 2028 projects to £29.80 using September 2027 CPI forecast 2.1%.
Scottish Carer Supplement coordination
Owned by open draft #2105, head
c3b8e320556d, which already addsuprating: gov.benefit_uprating_cpi. This PR leaves the supplement to that work. #2105 must refresh its hardcoded 2027–28 expectations against #2557's September CPI index; April 2027 now uses 3.5%. Coordination note posted on #2105.Tests
uvx ruff format --check .(1922 files), fullruff check --no-cache ., Python AST parsing, parsing all eight changed YAML files,git diff --check.UV_LINK_MODE=clone uv sync --frozen --extra dev, BLAS/OpenMP=2, foregroundpytest -n 2 -p no:cacheprovider, and the Scottish policy YAML suite; wait while load1 >110 and require ≥60 GB free with no active pause.Reproducer: policyengine_uk/tests/test_scottish_benefit_uprating.py::test_april_2027_scottish_rates_use_published_september_cpi, policyengine_uk/tests/policy/baseline/gov/social_security_scotland/september_cpi_uprating.yaml
axiom: TheAxiomFoundation/rulespec-uk#431 queued
Existing #431 tracks ss86A/86B encoding debt and the missing corpus/toolchain prerequisites. September CPI and nearest-5p rounding are policy inputs there; no duplicate issue or billed encoder run is needed.
Aggregate impact
Aggregate impact CI is queued. It pins #2557 head
9f2ebfc829684052b526b06874f3c6f725ec608dagainst this PR headd0917f4ca3ff2e6d8dbfbbbc54234b176afe9cf8on the certified dataset, isolating this Scottish delta from #2557's broader benefit-uprating change. No quantitative aggregate result is available yet. Expected direction: SCP and PAWHP spending rise from 2027–28; 2025–26 and 2026–27 remain unchanged. SCP increases by £0.35/week per eligible child against the removed 2027 forecast. No local aggregate simulation run.Hub handoff follows at the final head. Independent review belongs to the hub. Do not merge.