Benefit minimum ages

Computed Carer’s Allowance, Carer Support Payment (CSP) and Disability Living Allowance (DLA) mobility awards apply these minimum ages to each person’s existing annual age input:

The Carer’s Allowance condition appears in section 70(3) of the Great Britain Act and its Northern Ireland counterpart. CSP’s condition is in regulation 4(1). The DLA mobility ages and corresponding higher/lower routes appear in sections 73(1), (1A) and (11) of the Great Britain Act and Northern Ireland Act. Other qualifying conditions remain necessary. These gates do not implement a full eligibility assessment or change education, caring, disability, duration, upper-age or programme-replacement rules.

Reported inputs and amount overrides¶

A positive carers_allowance_reported value or sufficient caring hours cannot bypass the age condition in the computed CA/CSP pre-overlap amount. A DLA mobility category similarly cannot bypass its category’s age condition. The raw reported amounts and categories remain stored inputs.

Explicitly supplying a pre-overlap or final amount keeps the model’s generic input override behavior. For example, an explicit carers_allowance or dla_m amount can override its formula. Such an override is not evidence of statutory entitlement. Report-only positive carer cases also preserve an existing proxy; reported receipt does not legally waive the qualifying-care requirements.

DLA care has no categorical minimum-age floor. Its separate needs, duration and child-comparison conditions still apply, as set out in section 72 and its Northern Ireland counterpart. A care category for an infant assumes those conditions; it is not automatic entitlement. DLA totals continue to add the care and mobility components.

Dates and the annual model¶

The CA age parameter begins on 1 January 2015 as the model’s existing coverage anchor. This is not a claim that the legal age condition commenced in 2015. CSP’s raw age parameter starts on 19 November 2023, the commencement of regulation 4. The DLA mobility parameters start on 9 April 2001, as recorded in the Acts’ amendment annotations. These dates do not fill missing historical benefit rates or expand the existing Scottish CA-to-CSP model switch from 2025.

age is a Person/YEAR floating-point stock, with an existing default of 40 when omitted. The gates compare it directly, without flooring or rounding fractional ages. Awards retain the existing annual rate-times-52 convention. They do not calculate exact birthdays, part-year awards or award weeks. In particular, this does not newly implement CSP regulation 4(2)'s leap-day birthday rule.

At the unchanged 2026 rates, an otherwise qualifying carer aged 16 receives £4,495.40 before overlap; an under-16 computed award is zero. Higher and lower DLA mobility amounts are respectively £4,160 and £1,575.60 annually once the relevant age floor is met. These conditional examples do not estimate a population effect or establish independently encoded parity.

Combined CSP conditions¶

This change is stacked on the repaired PR #2473. Both the age condition and the earnings condition apply to computed CSP, including the reported-Carer’s-Allowance input proxy. Natural-pay cases combine age15, fractional ages below16, age16, the exact annual earnings limit and favorable fractional-penny treatment. The shared reader retains merged PR #2444 NI-age deductions. Existing annual/award-week, PAYE and care-charge qualifications remain in the CSP earnings assumptions.

Only after #2473 actually merges should this branch be retargeted and revalidated on current main; a queue entry or passing checks do not establish that landing. The shared-parameter change in open PR #2518 requires future CSP-reader/prose coordination; it is not copied or repaired here.