Cold Weather Payment (planned) - PolicyEngine UK documentation

Warning

Not yet modelled. The Cold Weather Payment (CWP) is a DWP payment of £25 per 7-day period of very cold weather to qualifying households in England and Wales. Northern Ireland runs its own scheme on the same terms (1 November 2026 to 31 March 2027, nidirect). PolicyEngine UK doesn’t model it. This page sets out the proposed scope, tracked in #435.

In Scotland the equivalent is the Winter Heating Payment, a flat annual payment (£62.00 from April 2026, regulation 9 of SSI 2023/16 as amended), which replaced Cold Weather Payment there from winter 2022-23 (first paid in February 2023). It isn’t modelled either. The separate Pension Age Winter Heating Payment, which replaced Winter Fuel Payment in Scotland, is modelled under gov.social_security_scotland.pawhp. Updated October 2026: amounts, legislation and the Scotland and Northern Ireland position checked.

What CWP is¶

Defined in The Social Fund Cold Weather Payments (General) Regulations 1988 (SI 1988/1724). A claimant qualifies if all of the following hold:

The address is in a postcode linked to a weather station where the average temperature is recorded as, or forecast to be, 0°C or below over 7 consecutive days between 1 November and 31 March.
A member of the benefit unit receives a qualifying benefit: Pension Credit; income-related ESA in the support or work-related activity group, or with a severe or enhanced disability premium, a pensioner premium, a disabled child or a child under 5 (Income Support and income-based JSA qualify on a similar test, under which the disability, higher pensioner and disabled child premiums also count); Universal Credit when neither the claimant nor a partner is employed or gainfully self-employed and someone has limited capability for work or there is a child under 5, or, whether working or not, when the award includes a disabled child amount; or Support for Mortgage Interest, either while treated as entitled to Pension Credit (no further condition) or with one of those premiums or children. The GOV.UK eligibility page summarises them; regulation 1A has the full conditions.
The home is in England or Wales, and the claimant doesn’t live in a care home, an independent hospital or certain other accommodation, unless the family includes a child under 5 or child tax credit includes a disability element (regulation 1A(4) and (8)).

The payment is £25 per 7-day cold period, and each further cold period triggers another payment. Spending varies a lot with the winter: in 2024-25, for example, about 1.4 million payments worth around £35 million were made in England and Wales (DWP, April 2025). DWP doesn’t count actual payments through the winter; it publishes the estimated number of eligible people at the start of each season and the weekly triggers, from which payments can be estimated.

Why this is harder than other DWP benefits¶

The eligibility test combines an administrative benefit check (mostly covered by existing PolicyEngine variables, though Support for Mortgage Interest and the legacy pensioner premium aren’t modelled) with a geographic weather event (no FRS analogue). Modelling the weather side has three plausible approaches:

Expected-value parameterisation: a single national gov.dwp.cold_weather_payment.expected_periods_per_year parameter capturing the long-run-average number of 7-day cold periods triggered per winter. Multiply by £25 and by the qualifying benefit-unit flag to produce the expected annual payment. Easy to implement, accurate in aggregate, wrong in any specific winter.
Regional weather mixing: a per-region weather-event distribution (for example, the North East has more cold periods than London on average), parameterised from DWP’s trigger counts by weather station. Captures the distributional skew without forecasting any particular winter.
Year-specific lookups: tabulate the DWP-published Cold Weather Payment estimates by weather station by year (mapped to regions through DWP’s postcode-district lists) and use those as historical inputs. Most accurate for back-cast simulations; needs ongoing updating.

Recommendation: option 2 (regional mixing) for prospective analysis and option 3 for back-casts where the data is available.

Proposed scope¶

Phase 1: qualifying-benefit gate and expected-value payment¶

New parameter gov.dwp.cold_weather_payment.amount = £25. The amount was lower in earlier years, so take any backdated values from the amendment history of SI 1988/1724.
New parameter gov.dwp.cold_weather_payment.expected_periods_per_year = long-run national average from DWP CWP statistics.
New variable cold_weather_payment_eligible (BenUnit, YEAR) that fires if any benefit unit member receives one of the qualifying benefits with the relevant addition / age trigger.
New variable cold_weather_payment (BenUnit, YEAR) = amount × expected_periods_per_year × eligible.

This delivers a model that gets the policy-relevant slice right (who qualifies for CWP and how it interacts with their other benefits) at the cost of smoothing year-to-year weather variance.

Phase 2: regional weather mixing¶

Add a gov.dwp.cold_weather_payment.expected_periods_by_region table parameterised from DWP’s trigger counts by weather station, and a household-side lookup by region.

Phase 3: Scotland’s Winter Heating Payment¶

Paid by Social Security Scotland under The Winter Heating Assistance (Low Income) (Scotland) Regulations 2023 (SSI 2023/16). The qualifying benefits are essentially the same as for Cold Weather Payment (Pension Credit with no further condition; the other benefits with the same disability, pensioner-premium or child-under-5 conditions), assessed in a qualifying week (2 to 8 November in 2026), but the payment is a flat annual amount with no weather trigger. So:

winter_heating_payment_eligible: the Phase 1 benefit conditions, without Cold Weather Payment’s care-home and England-and-Wales conditions (and without the child tax credit disability element, which Winter Heating Payment dropped in 2025), plus residence in Scotland in the qualifying week. Reuse the Phase 1 benefit-condition variable rather than a second copy of the benefit conditions.
winter_heating_payment = amount × eligible, with amount uprated each year (£62.00 from April 2026).

Data needs¶

DWP, Cold Weather Payment statistics: estimated eligible numbers at the start of each season and weekly triggers by weather station. The main calibration source.
Social Security Scotland’s Winter Heating Payment statistics: Phase 3 calibration.
DWP’s trigger counts by weather station (Table 3 of each season’s Cold Weather Payment estimates), mapped to regions through DWP’s postcode-district lists: Phase 2 regional expected-period parameterisation. The Met Office’s historic station data gives only monthly series for 37 stations, so it can serve as a cross-check but can’t count 7-day cold periods.

The FRS records region, from which the model derives country, so the England-and-Wales and Scotland gates need no extra data. Region is a coarse stand-in for the weather-station areas that trigger payments, so Phase 2 models a regional average, not individual stations.

Open questions¶

The qualifying-benefit list is narrower than for the Warm Home Discount in England and Wales, which now covers bill-payers on Universal Credit, Housing Benefit, income-related ESA or Pension Credit. Model the eligibility as one composite variable, shared with the Scottish Winter Heating Payment, or as separate flags by route (Universal Credit, legacy benefits, Pension Credit)?
Spending is small next to most modelled benefits, but the payment matters to the low-income pensioners and disabled households it targets. Phase 1 is worth doing even if Phase 2 doesn’t follow.

References¶

The Social Fund Cold Weather Payments (General) Regulations 1988 (SI 1988/1724).
gov.uk, Cold Weather Payment.
DWP, Cold Weather Payment statistics.
Scottish equivalent: The Winter Heating Assistance (Low Income) (Scotland) Regulations 2023 (SSI 2023/16); mygov.scot.
Northern Ireland: nidirect, Cold Weather Payment.
Issue: #435.