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Pensioners without Pension Credit are tested on household savings only for the council tax reduction capital limit #1936
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- added a commit that references this issue
on Oct 2, 2026 Evidence from PolicyBench UK round 2 (policyengine-uk 2.126.7; unchanged on 2.126.8 and main c6d15c8). The savings-only proxy in
council_tax_reduction_assessable_capitalis not limited to pensioners: its default branch applies to working-age schemes too, as the four cells below show (two Scottish working-age, one Oxford working-age, one English pensioner).Cell Scheme Household savings (the proxy) Capital left out Reference CTR Law scenario_022 Scotland, working age £4,687 £36,324 corporate financial wealth £1,153.00 £0 (capital over £16,000) scenario_023 Scotland, working age £234 £61,946 corporate financial wealth £152.41 £0 scenario_118 Oxford, working age £0 (none stated) £329,807 corporate financial wealth £2,008.50 £0 scenario_064 England pensioner (Bradford) £14,061 £83,004 corporate financial wealth £1,793.44 £0 All six models gave £0 in each case. The judge (GPT-6.1 Sol, blind to the engine) also derived £0, and I checked each against the engine's capital variable.
Follow-up from #1909's review (finding F1).
council_tax_reduction_assessable_capitalhas three cases:pension_credit_assessable_capitalfor savings-credit-only recipients, which is the Secretary of State's figure;savingsonly for everyone else.The pensioner schemes' own capital rules count more than savings, including second homes, land and investments: SI 2012/2885 Sch 1 Part 6 Chapter 3 (paras 31-36), WSI 2013/3029 Sch 1 paras 25-30 and SSI 2012/319 regs 40-46. So a pensioner who does not claim Pension Credit is tested on less capital than a savings-credit-only claimant with the same assets. A YAML case in
council_tax_reduction_pension_credit.yamlpins the gap: savings of £10,000 plus a £7,000 second property gives £0 when claiming savings credit and £1,999.60 when not.Blocked on separating pension wealth from
corporate_wealth. That bundle is about 85% imputed pension wealth, which the schemes disregard (#1837, PolicyEngine/policyengine-uk-data#452). Widening the test before the split would spread that over-count to every pensioner.The non-Pension-Credit route also lacks pensioner tariff income (Sch 1 para 37). See the income issue.
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