The Social Security (Income and Capital Disregards) (Amendment) Regulations 2026, S.I. 2026/1072, were made on 8 October 2026 and laid before Parliament on 9 October 2026. Their single policy purpose is to ensure that payments made under the Church of England redress scheme are left out of key means-tested benefit calculations. Under regulation 1, the instrument comes into force on 31 October 2026 or, if later, on the day section 12 of the Abuse Redress Measure 2025 takes effect. The regulations extend to England and Wales and Scotland.
In plain English, the measure protects a redress award from being treated as income or capital when entitlement is worked out. That matters because means-tested benefits can otherwise fall if a claimant receives a lump sum or related payment, even where that payment is compensatory in nature. The Explanatory Note on legislation.gov.uk states that regulations 2 to 6 create new disregards for payments made by the scheme administered by the Church of England under the Abuse Redress Measure 2025. The drafting places those payments alongside other protected redress awards already recognised in social security rules, including Mother and Baby Scheme payments.
The amendments reach across five benefit regimes. They change the State Pension Credit Regulations 2002, the Housing Benefit Regulations 2006, the Housing Benefit (Persons who have attained the qualifying age for state pension credit) Regulations 2006, the Employment and Support Allowance Regulations 2008 and the Universal Credit Regulations 2013. For Pension Credit, Housing Benefit and ESA, the instrument threads Church of England redress payments through existing provisions on disregarded income, disregarded capital, notional income, notional capital and, where relevant, housing cost and non-dependant deduction rules. For Universal Credit, regulation 76 on special schemes for compensation is expanded so that the Church of England scheme is expressly included.
That technical drafting has a direct practical effect. A payment made under the Church of England redress scheme is not to be counted in the same way as ordinary savings, ordinary income or a notional resource for the purposes of the listed benefit calculations. The instrument also widens the definition of a qualifying person in the relevant regulations. In policy terms, this brings recipients of Church of England redress within the same established disregard structure already used for other specified redress schemes.
The administrative route is also set out clearly in the instrument. According to the preamble, the Social Security Advisory Committee agreed that the proposals did not need to be referred to it. For the Housing Benefit amendments in regulations 3 and 4, the Secretary of State also consulted organisations appearing to represent the authorities concerned, reflecting local authority administration of those rules. The regulations were signed for the Secretary of State by Stephen Timms, Minister of State at the Department for Work and Pensions, on 8 October 2026. For councils, DWP caseworkers and welfare advisers, the immediate issue is operational rather than policy redesign: systems and decision-making guidance will need to recognise Church of England redress payments as protected sums from commencement.
The instrument is deliberately narrow. It does not create the Church of England redress scheme, alter the amount of any award or widen general benefit entitlement. Its function is confined to the treatment of those payments once they are made. That distinction matters in live cases. The benefit effect depends on administrators correctly identifying a payment as one made by the scheme administered under the Abuse Redress Measure 2025, rather than treating it as ordinary capital or income.
The Explanatory Note states that no full impact assessment has been produced because no, or no significant, effect on the private, voluntary or public sector is foreseen. Even so, the policy effect is clear: compensation paid through this redress route is being ring-fenced from the core means tests used across the named benefits. For claimants and practitioners, the main change is straightforward even if the drafting is not. From 31 October 2026, or later if section 12 has not yet commenced, Church of England redress payments are to be disregarded within the specified social security calculations in England, Wales and Scotland.