Skip to content

Abolish income-related ESA from 1 July 2026 (NI 1 October 2026) and stop paying it alongside UC #1914

Description

@MaxGhenis

Problem

Two related problems with income-related ESA:

  1. The abolition is not modelled. SI 2026/409 (made 15 April 2026) inserted art 3A into SI 2025/1148, so the ESA "amending provisions" come into force on 1 July 2026 for the remaining old-style ESA awards. That ends income-related ESA.

    • Art 3A(2) saves awards where a person is appointed under reg 57 of the Claims and Payments Regulations 2013, or where an appointee was judged likely to be needed within the previous 6 months.
    • Northern Ireland has the same structure from 1 October 2026 (SR 2025/176 art 3A, inserted by SR 2026/115).

    esa_income passes reported awards through a capital screen with no end date.

  2. ESA(IR) and UC overlap. esa_income is not gated on the UC claim and is not UC unearned income. On the Enhanced FRS 2024-25 (uk-data 1.56.16, main at 1c5b4d0, 2027), the model pays £2.23bn of ESA(IR) to 188.8k benefit units. £1.64bn of it goes to 137.8k units that also receive UC. A UC claim ends an old-style ESA award.

Proposal

Activity

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions