Repository navigation
Give Northern Ireland its own LHA maximums and March 2020 minimum - #2601
Merged
Merged
Conversation
Add gov.dfc.LHA.maximum, gov.dfc.LHA.maximum_monthly and gov.dfc.LHA.march_2020_minimum from SR 2008/100 and SR 2016/222, with values equal to the Great Britain ones, and determine Northern Ireland's rates under them. Great Britain-only reforms to the maxima or minimum no longer change Northern Ireland renters' LHA rates. Fixes #2525 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Contributor
Aggregate impact on certified data: passBase Checks: 0 broken by this change, 1 failing on both sides, 0 fixed. Moves flagged for review: 0 (thresholds in Notes
Moves flagged for reviewNone. Spending by benefit and service
Caseloads
Standard reform costings (change in gov_balance)
Standard reforms: change in each reform's target
Household net income by decileNo household's net income changes in any year. No change in any year: receipts by tax head; government balance, each component counted once; model totals; household income totals; population; poverty rates; people in poverty; inequality; mean household net income in each side's own deciles. 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
|
juaristi22
approved these changes
Oct 23, 2026
juaristi22
left a comment
juaristi22
left a comment
Collaborator
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Independent review complete at 70b39762ff3c54136a5c2081aa5fc2b4aa187a12: APPROVE, with no findings or material evidence gaps.
The NI weekly and monthly cap amounts and dates match the official 2020 amendment and 2024 amendment. Passing the complete national parameter node keeps GB-only and NI-only reforms isolated through final HB/UC awards, including frozen determinations and the pre-2020 published-history shortcut.
Validation: 127 repository tests passed, plus two valid final-award diagnostics across separate executions. An initial reviewer HB diagnostic omitted the continuing-award premise and failed; that rejected case and its nonzero exits are retained, and only the corrected, previously uncomputed HB case ran separately. Eleven official originals and their extracts were checked independently.
The inherited £232.82 monthly 2020 floor remains a weekly-derived fallback; this review does not identify it as an independently published monthly determination. No full-suite or population execution was performed. Hosted CI is checked separately at publication.
Collaborator
|
UK hub (Claude session, for Max): independent review (GPT-6.1 Sol) at
Two nonblocking notes:
All 16 checks pass and it merges cleanly. @vahid-ahmadi, it's still a draft: mark it ready when you're happy, and the hub will land it. |
Collaborator
|
Merged by the UK hub (Claude session 8e19f9d5) at head
|
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
Summary
Northern Ireland LHA rates now take their weekly and monthly maximums and the 31 March 2020 minimum from new
gov.dfc.LHAparameters, not the Great Britain ones. A reform togov.dwp.LHA.maximum,gov.dwp.LHA.maximum_monthlyorgov.dwp.LHA.march_2020_minimumnow changes Great Britain rates only. This completes what #2503 started forfreezeandpercentile.Fixes #2525
What changed
gov.dfc.LHA.maximum.{A..E},gov.dfc.LHA.maximum_monthly.{A..E}andgov.dfc.LHA.march_2020_minimum. They have the same values as the Great Britain parameters, so baseline outputs do not change.utils/lha.py:determination()takes the nation's parameter node (lha=) and reads the percentile, maxima and minimum from it. Northern Ireland gets its own determination when any of these differ from Great Britain's in the determination year (_determination_rules), not only when the freeze or percentile differ.gov.dwp.LHA.march_2020_minimumto the new NI parameter.Evidence (legislation.gov.uk, fetched 23 Oct 2026)
The current revised text of both schedules still shows the 2024 maximums.
The tests use the Housing Executive's Belfast shared room rates (archived NIHE pages, the same sources as
lha_published_rates_sources.csv). They are £53.58 a week from 1 April 2020, which is the 31 March 2020 minimum, and £75.75 a week from 1 April 2024. The nidirect monthly figure for April 2024 is £329.15. The monthly minimum is 53.58 x 365 / 7 / 12 = £232.82.Tests
test_lha_published_rates.py:test_great_britain_maxima_and_minimum_leave_northern_ireland_unchangedcovers three GB-only reforms. Belfast stays at £75.75 a week and £329.15 a month.test_northern_ireland_keeps_its_minimum_when_great_britain_ends_its_owncuts both nations' shared room maximums to £50 a week and £100 a month and ends only GB's minimum. Belfast stays at £53.58 and £232.82; Maidstone falls to £50 and £100.test_northern_ireland_maxima_and_minimum_change_only_northern_ireland: the same cuts with NI's own minimum ended give Belfast £50 and £100. Maidstone does not change.test_northern_ireland_maxima_and_minimum_match_great_britain_in_baselinechecks that the GB and NI values are equal in every year from 2020 to 2030.test_northern_ireland_uc_keeps_the_march_2020_minimumnow reformsgov.dfc.LHA.maximum_monthly.A, as Northern Ireland LHA still reads GB maximums and the March 2020 minimum #2525 asked.reformed_parametersproperty helper applies the maximum and minimum reforms to both nations.test_lha_freeze.py::test_great_britain_lha_maxima_and_minimum_leave_northern_ireland_unchangedcheckshousing_benefit_LHA_rate,LHA_capanduc_LHA_cap.test_lha_*.py, the two LHA property files andtests/code_healthgive 2,734 passed. The parameter metadata, description and fiscal-year tests give 42 passed.ruff checkandruff format --checkare clean.Reproducer: policyengine_uk/tests/test_lha_published_rates.py::test_great_britain_maxima_and_minimum_leave_northern_ireland_unchanged
axiom: TheAxiomFoundation/rulespec-uk#475 queued
rulespec-uk#475, the NI LHA determination queued for #2503, already covers these provisions: SR 2008/100 Sch paras 2(2)(b) and 3A, and SR 2016/222 Sch 1 paras 2(2)(b) and 6. Its blocker still applies: the corpus has no Northern Ireland LHA rows. So no new issue is filed.
Open question
The new NI series starts in April 2020. Determinations before then are taken as published, so the model never reads an earlier maximum. The Great Britain weekly series goes back to 2014 for reference only. If an NI history back to 2014 is wanted for documentation, it would come from the earlier NI amending regulations.
🤖 Generated with Claude Code