[juaristi22]

Draft, not ready for review. Main is merged in after #1420 and #1421, the lock moves to policyengine-uk 2.165.1, and the national and local target surfaces are regenerated once on the pinned feed (Chronicle 53815b2). Phase B (the spine and calibration items) follows on this branch.

Summary

This PR takes the engine-free items of #1095 that María ruled on 29 October (Phase A), and the first re-bump past #1421 (Phase C): policyengine-uk 2.165.1. The spine and calibration items (Phase B) follow on this branch, each measured in its own arm.

policyengine-uk 2.165.1

The lock moves from 2.164.2, which #1421 brought, to the newest release.

• Other investment income in HBAI, market and capital income (2.164.3, Count other investment income in market and HBAI income policyengine-uk#2736; 2.164.4, Count other investment income in capital income, and test it in every income measure policyengine-uk#2746). The LCFS, NEED and NTS stages band recipients on the engine's HBAI income with its deductions added back, so their gross income now counts it, as the surveys' gross incomes do. The WAS stage reads capital_income as a predictor, so the recipients' figure now matches the donor's gross income from all financial investments (DVGIINVR8).
• Company car and car fuel benefits (2.165.0, Model the company car and car fuel benefits, with Class 1A NICs policyengine-uk#2750). The build writes none of the nine person inputs, so no one has a company car and both benefits and their Class 1A NICs are zero, as before. The inputs are signed at their default in UK_ENGINE_DEFAULT_INPUTS, for María's signature. The company car PR for the Autumn Budget dashboard supplies six of them.
• Tax-Free Childcare over a smaller UC award (2.165.1, Keep Tax-Free Childcare over a smaller UC award, and take no deductions from awards only a reform creates policyengine-uk#2754). A family that would claim UC keeps Tax-Free Childcare instead when the top-up is worth more than the award. No debt deductions come out of an award only a reform creates. Every new variable is a formula.
• No economic assumption moves. The vendored uprating pins and the bonus-sacrifice anchor change only their version stamps, and no gate digest moves.

Regeneration on feed 53815b2

The national and local references, membership and compile-parity receipts are regenerated once on the merged tree, on main's feed pin (Chronicle 53815b2, #1420's re-pin). The vendored resources check against the full artifact unchanged. The local census, the local references, the local parity receipt and the coverage manifest regenerate unchanged.

• National surface: 1,409 active references, up from 1,403, and no row left without a fact (four before). The new rows are the three OBR council tax nation rows (D14e) and SLC's three nation rows (R4). The DfE rows, the R7 windows and obr.council_tax move as described above. The incumbent's three devolved SLC metrics now match the nation rows exactly.
• Local surface: 27,168 active references, every status count unchanged. The signed deferrals fall from 94 to 77, as the support-floor deferrals now follow each target's nations.
• A window fix the regeneration found: R7's calendar-2025 window on dfi_ni.bus.passenger_receipts failed to compile, because its selector pins two services and the window counted series only from list-valued source keys. A dimension pinned to several values now names one series per value. The window of the sum is the sum of the windowed series, and a service short of a year refuses the window. No other UK, US or NZ window reference pins several dimension values.

Targets

• OBR council tax by nation (D14e): the three nation rows are pinned to the UK and held as measured diagnostics.
• Declared geography wins (R8, R9): a selector's declared geography_id is returned before the inferred pin, and the authoring refuses a disagreeing pin.
• SLC devolved repayments (R4): slc.repayments.devolved_total becomes one row per nation. Wales binds. Scotland and Northern Ireland are held out, by María's ruling. Their 2024-25 outturn binds at the 2025 period under a matched-period hold she signed on 29 October.
• Calendar-2025 window (R7): Scottish Child Payment, the TFC top-up, Northern Ireland bus receipts and the four SLC England repayment rows.
• Ledger observation_period: a reference can select its facts at a declared period while the target keeps its own.
• DfE (D5): the eight rows bind the January 2026 census at model year 2025. The three in_year_snapshot holds are retired.
• Window-ratio complement: a numerator can be its denominator less the listed cells.
• OBR council tax (D14f): binds the main-residence share: England's chargeable dwellings less second homes and empty homes, over chargeable dwellings (MHCLG, October 2025, about 0.968). Scotland and Wales take England's share, as a stated approximation.
• Signed exclusions: D3 keeps Scotland's three-plus-children rows out with a corrected reason. D18a signs the MSOA income deferral. D18c keeps Northern Ireland's UC area cells out.

Spine and stage records

• Carry manifest rewrites into the shared Stage/StageRecord producer graph #721: StageRecord carries rewrote, the stage's declared rewrites, in both the plan and the graph builds. The hand-written education_grants carve-out is gone, so Carry manifest rewrites into the shared Stage/StageRecord producer graph #721 can close when this lands.
• Support-floor deferrals follow each target's local-authority scope: the Welsh and Scottish families no longer defer the two English micro-authorities.

Gates

• Zero-weight strata (Adjudicate the UK spine grain at the ingest/calibration seam #688): both SPI-synthetic strata are capped at 0. The June caps of 100,000 counted the retired ten-clone grain, and the national seam ships no zero-weight row.
• Export surface (WS-E spine deferrals: known bugs and signed inconsistencies awaiting their increment #796): the all-zero incapacity_benefit_reported exclusion never matched the pinned reference, so it is dropped. The release boundary still drops the column.
• macro_realism (Swap the microcosm-built UK spine into the national build and retire the incumbent feed #757): not declared, and the battery's policy text records why. The solve binds the income components directly, and the national accounts' household disposable income differs in scope. The release contract refuses a not_applicable entry in this spec vintage.
• Take-up flags at their stages (María's ruling, "do both"): frs_take_up, frs_person_draws and frs_household_draws record their flags' shares at the stage's weights. Three assembled-phase gates hold them to their contract targets, at the terminal gate's bounds until a spine receipt measures them. The terminal uk_take_up_signal gate stays release-blocking.
• The battery, spine-part, release-cut and dense digests in microcosm-data's contract move with the manifest.

Disclosure floor of 3 (A1)

María ruled on 29 October to move every UK disclosure floor from ten source households to three, CD171's absolute floor. One constant, receipt_counts.UK_DISCLOSURE_FLOOR, now sets it for the stage receipts, the stage-health gates and the report tools. A withheld figure reads "<3", and banded counts gain a "3-9" band. The statistical floors stay: the zero-support floor, the private-rent tool's ten-row group rule, and the SPI coherence tool's floor for medians and quantiles. The signed rules in local_small_cell_rule.json defer published cells, not survey cells, so they are unchanged.

Default UK load (#823): a change for every consumer

microcosm.data.load("uk") now follows latest-national.json. That pointer names the certified national cut promoted on 26 October (microcosm-uk-2024-25-national-20261025T091414Z-a6299504, built on policyengine-uk 2.151.0). The default used to be the June 2023 populace_uk_2023 artifact, which stays at load("uk", 2023). The national variant key retires.

Text

Stale tracker text in notes, docstrings and the vendored bus resources' purposes. The Incapacity Benefit leaf note now names the FRS 2024-25. The charter-H2 fixture and the release input coverage manifest follow the stage contract digests.

Not in this PR yet

• 2.165.1's Tax-Free Childcare choice moves fewer than three source households on the 29 October spine, so it needs no data rule. The childcare refit (Phase B) runs on this lock.
• Ruled on 29 October: obr.sdlt keeps the households' share (the follow-up is in UK: every open data item: uk-data parity, engine locks, the local surface, consumption and high-value homes #1095); no Carer's Allowance stage gate until a caseload target binds; the HBAI check keeps its four statistics; SPI copies take their twin's contributory JSA and ESA only under the permitted-work limit (Phase B). Households' council tax on other property is Households' council tax on second homes and other property (engine and data) #1423.
• Still open: NS9c (explored separately) and the signed spine differences (after the childcare refit). D12b waits for the next calibration-year move, and certification against the promoted cut gets its own PR.
• Needs Chronicle first: Publish Chronicle package IDs in calibration diagnostics targets #661 (package ids in the consumer artifact).
• Overlaps: UK #1095 A/B fixes: the SPI age band (uk-data#628), households' HRAD from Table 8a receipts, and the SPI pay floor (uk-data#629) #1426 and the company car PR change the same generated files (uk/gates.json and its digests, the release input coverage manifest, the charter-H2 fixture), and the company car PR also locks policyengine-uk. Whichever lands second regenerates them and keeps the newer lock.
• Phase B (each item measured): PR 2b, the stake level, HICBC opt-outs, the Carer's Allowance stage order, advanced ages, the benefit cap, and the rest of the approved plan.

Tests

• Engine tier on policyengine-uk 2.165.1 (at e40eabd1b, before the regeneration): every UK engine test passes, run in full locally because CI stops at the first failure. Three needed updates: Tax-Free Childcare's top-up now lives in a shared helper, which still reads the spend the build routes; the company car's list price and capital contributions are person-level stocks that are no one's capital; and the graph build's stage records list each stage's rewrites beside its outputs (Carry manifest rewrites into the shared Stage/StageRecord producer graph #721).
• Engine-free suite: before the regeneration, the merged surfaces passed (1,075 and 571 tests) bar the one test that waited for it. The full suite on this head is running locally in 30-file chunks, and the feed-reading tests run one file at a time after it.
• Checks: tools/ci_test_plan.py verify, tools/spec_engine_coverage.py --check, the vendoring check against the full artifact, and ruff on the edited files.

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[vahid-ahmadi]

@juaristi22 this is an early look at 5a944e449, not a full review, since the body says it isn't ready. It covers must and should items only, and nothing on your own pending list. I'll do a full pass after main merges in and the references regenerate.

1. must: an engine-uk failure the body doesn't list. tests/engine/uk/test_uk_graph.py:84 still asserts set(nonzero_share) == set(stage.outputs). But _graph_stage_records now adds stage.rewrites to shares (Carry manifest rewrites into the shared Stage/StageRecord producer graph #721). So age_tail fails in engine-uk on both Pythons (run 40917095981, at this head). Regenerating won't fix it. The assertion needs set(stage.outputs) | set(stage.rewrites). The body's engine-tier line covers only the charter-H2 parity test, so this one was missed.
2. should: rounded_count now prints exact counts from three to nine (receipt_counts.py:103). The module docstring still says "no exact count that ... narrows a small group by difference". extreme_count and support_band print "3-9" there instead. Printing exact counts just above the floor is where differencing bites. That matters more now that the floor is three rather than ten, CD171's working minimum against secondary disclosure across outputs, as the docstring says. I'd keep "3-9" in rounded_count too. I'm not reopening the ruling. Please link the UK: every open data item: uk-data parity, engine locks, the local surface, consumption and high-value homes #1095 comment that records it from the module and the changelog, and say there that the SN 9422 conditions (HMRC sees SPI-based material ten working days ahead) are unchanged.
3. should: UK #1095 A/B fixes: the SPI age band (uk-data#628), households' HRAD from Table 8a receipts, and the SPI pay floor (uk-data#629) #1426 adds new "<10" sites. The SPI pay-floor receipt in UK #1095 A/B fixes: the SPI age band (uk-data#628), households' HRAD from Table 8a receipts, and the SPI pay floor (uk-data#629) #1426 hardcodes ten in several places. Whichever of the two lands second should move them onto UK_DISCLOSURE_FLOOR. Otherwise one receipt stays on the old floor without anyone noticing. I've raised it on UK #1095 A/B fixes: the SPI age band (uk-data#628), households' HRAD from Table 8a receipts, and the SPI pay floor (uk-data#629) #1426 too.
4. should: ship the Promotion for the constant-id national line: pointer and certified-loader extension #823 default-load flip on its own. Pointing load("uk") at latest-national.json and retiring variant="national" affects every consumer. It doesn't depend on Budget 2026 slower data fixes, PR C of #1418: electricity at the ONS level, pension income by area #1420, Budget 2026 ISA data, PR B of #1418: ISA subscriptions per adult, the Lifetime ISA anchor, additive ISA income, policyengine-uk 2.164.2 #1421 or the regeneration. As its own small PR it could land now, and it wouldn't be held behind this one. The old 823-national-variant-until-promoted.changed.md entry, which describes the opposite state, should go in the same change.

The D14f main-residence share (0.968) is covered on #1423: #1423 (comment).

What I ran. I read the diff at 5a944e449 against its base fddbc7073 and the failing CI logs. I didn't run anything locally. I didn't review the target, gate or ledger changes in detail, and I'll leave those for the full pass.

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[vahid-ahmadi]

@juaristi22 review of b46be0044, round 2. The title and body still say draft, but GitHub shows the PR as ready for review. Worth marking it draft, or dropping "(draft)" from the title, so the two agree.

Earlier findings (round 1, at 5a944e449)

1. must, engine-uk graph records test: fixed. e40eabd1b expects outputs and rewrites (tests/engine/uk/test_uk_graph.py:84-89) and checks rewrote. engine-uk passes on both Pythons.
2. should, rounded_count exact from three to nine: still open. receipt_counts.py:102-103 still returns the exact count, and the module docstring (receipt_counts.py:5-7) still rules out an exact count that narrows a small group by difference. The changelog now says it plainly, which helps. It still doesn't link the UK: every open data item: uk-data parity, engine locks, the local surface, consumption and high-value homes #1095 comment that records the ruling.
3. should, UK #1095 A/B fixes: the SPI age band (uk-data#628), households' HRAD from Table 8a receipts, and the SPI pay floor (uk-data#629) #1426's hardcoded "<10": still open. UK #1095 A/B fixes: the SPI age band (uk-data#628), households' HRAD from Table 8a receipts, and the SPI pay floor (uk-data#629) #1426 hasn't moved (457af0274, e.g. spi_income.py:936 < 10, and its tests assert "<10"). The body's Overlaps paragraph names only the shared generated files. One line there would cover it: whichever lands second moves those sites onto UK_DISCLOSURE_FLOOR.
4. should, the Promotion for the constant-id national line: pointer and certified-loader extension #823 default-load flip: still in this PR. Two older fragments still describe the opposite state, and they would ship in the same release notes as 823-national-line-default-load.changed.md. They are changelog.d/823-national-variant-until-promoted.changed.md and the last sentence of changelog.d/823-uk-2025-registry.changed.md.

D14f's main-residence share: there's no reply on #1423 yet and the PR is unchanged, so that point stays there: #1423 (comment)

New findings

5. must: engine-free is red on both Pythons, with five failures and two causes. CI shows only one failure because it runs with --maxfail=1. I reproduced all five locally.

   • test_uk_target_references.py:126 still pins ACTIVE_REFERENCE_COUNT = 1403. This is probably the test the body says waited for the regeneration, but b46be0044 didn't update it. The regenerated surface has 1,409, so :345 and :1116 fail. The status counts at :1119 also need no_fact_at_or_before_period gone.
   • The second cause is new. The regeneration puts slc.repayments.england_plan_2 on the calendar-2025 window. The fixture feed tests/fixtures/uk_target_reference_feed_rows.jsonl has its two series (full-time and part-time) only for FY2024, so the compile refuses: "needs the years opening in [2024, 2025] from each of 2 series; found [2024]". That fails test_uk_ledger_targets.py:599 and two tests in test_uk_target_references.py: compile_from_real_staged_feed_rows and constrain_a_frame_with_prepared_columns. With 4962bc3f3's surfaces the fixture test passes. Adding FY2025 rows for both plan 2 series to the fixture should fix all three.

6. should: the regeneration moves 21 SPI uprating holds that the body doesn't mention. In target_reference_membership.json, the eight self-employment band holds go from 1.11763 to 1.11152 (about -0.55%), and the 13 dividend band holds go from 1.088147 to 1.088151. The new values are right. Budget 2026 ISA data, PR B of #1418: ISA subscriptions per adult, the Lifetime ISA anchor, additive ISA income, policyengine-uk 2.164.2 #1421's 2.164.2 lock refreshed hmrc_uprating_engine_pins.json with the October EFO: per-capita mixed income, 2023 to 2025, falls from 1.0384 to 1.0327. But main's surfaces were last generated before that (ead8943d6), so this regeneration catches them up. The lock's "no economic assumption moves" holds for c5d40e4c8. But the regeneration section lists what moves (DfE, the R7 windows, obr.council_tax) and leaves these out. Please add the 21 holds there, so nobody reads the SPI rows as unchanged.

7. should: 2.164.3 reaches more stages than the body lists. pe-uk's own test (other_investment_income_in_household_income.yaml) shows household_net_income gains other_investment_income too, not only market, HBAI and capital income. These stages also read the moved incomes:

   • was_wealth reads household_net_income against DVTotinc_bhcR8 (was_wealth.py:64, :350).
   • was_lisa reads it as a predictor and for its tertiles (was_lisa.py:164, :1405).
   • etb_services reads hbai_household_net_income against ETB's disinc (etb_services.py:62, :322), and etb_vat reads etb_disposable_income, which is built from the engine's HBAI income (household_income.py:110-125).

   The body names LCFS, NEED, NTS and WAS's capital_income only. Worth listing these too, and saying whether each donor's income measure already counts this income.

8. nit: the selector windowing (4962bc3f3) looks correct. Each pinned value partitions by the fact's dimensions, a service short of a year refuses, and a missing service fails len(complete) != expected_series. The regeneration drops expected_member_count: 2 from dfi_ni.bus.passenger_receipts, and the window's series count now carries that check. One test where a service is absent entirely, not just short a year, would pin that.

Interactions. The feed pin is right: chronicle_feed.json and all 57 vendored source_commit values are on 53815b2, the same pin #1420 and #1421 used, with no stale pins. #1430 is stated on both sides: it locks 2.165.0 and this PR locks 2.165.1, the newer lock is kept, and the second PR removes only the six company car inputs its stage writes. test_uk_terminal_gates.py:514 would catch a written input left among UK_ENGINE_DEFAULT_INPUTS. pe-uk 2.164.2 to 2.165.1 changes no economic_assumptions parameter; uprating_indices.yaml gains only the three company car inputs under CPI.

Verdict: not ready to approve. Finding 5 has to go green first. Findings 2 to 4, 6 and 7 are small body or fragment edits. The body still says Phase B follows on this branch, so I'll look again when that lands.

What I ran. A fresh clone at b46be0044 with uv sync --all-packages --locked. These engine-free files: shared/test_ledger_targets.py, shared/test_engine_core_pins.py, uk/test_uk_receipt_counts.py, uk/test_uk_terminal_gates.py, uk/test_uk_chronicle_feed.py, uk/test_uk_ledger_targets.py, uk/test_uk_target_references.py. Only the five failures above failed. I also ran the fixture test against 4962bc3f3's surfaces. I diffed the national and local surfaces against main, and diffed pe-uk 2.164.2...2.165.1. I didn't run the engine tier, a build or the full engine-free suite, and I didn't check the 2.165.1 Tax-Free Childcare claim (fewer than three source households) or the local surface beyond the deferral and status counts. engine-us was still running when I checked.

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