Benefits Rules Ignore Church of England Redress Payments
If you saw the title of this statutory instrument and felt your eyes glaze over, you are not alone. Behind the legal wording on legislation.gov.uk sits one important change: payments made by the Church of England scheme under the Abuse Redress Measure 2025 are to be ignored when certain means-tested benefits are worked out. That matters because a redress payment is meant to acknowledge harm. Without a specific protection, the same payment could have been treated as income or savings and used to cut support. The regulations were made on 8 October 2026, laid before Parliament on 9 October 2026, and come into force on 31 October 2026, unless section 12 of the Abuse Redress Measure 2025 starts later.
If the phrase income and capital disregards sounds like official jargon, here is the plain-English version. When the benefits system checks what someone can receive, it looks at the money coming in and the money they already have. A disregard tells decision-makers to leave a named payment out of that calculation. What this means for you is straightforward. A Church of England redress payment should not be treated as proof that a survivor suddenly has money to live on, or enough savings to lose help. In a means-tested system, that small legal word - disregard - can make a very large difference.
The change does not sit in one corner of the welfare system. The regulations amend the State Pension Credit Regulations 2002, the Housing Benefit Regulations 2006, the separate Housing Benefit rules for people who have reached the qualifying age for state pension credit, the Employment and Support Allowance Regulations 2008, and the Universal Credit Regulations 2013. So, if you are trying to work out who is covered, the answer is broad. The protection reaches pension-age support, housing help, sickness-related support and Universal Credit. The instrument extends to England and Wales and Scotland.
The drafting is repetitive because benefits law has lots of routes by which money can be counted. The new instrument adds a definition of Church of England Redress payment and then inserts it into the places where income, capital and related calculations are checked. It also updates the definition of a qualifying person so this new payment is treated in the same family as other protected redress schemes already recognised in law. That is why the wording appears in rules on housing costs, non-dependant deductions, sums treated as capital and other technical corners of the system. The aim is simple even if the text is not: stop the payment affecting entitlement through the back door.
Some of the most important lines are the ones about notional income and notional capital. Those rules let decision-makers treat a person as if they have money in some situations, even when the picture is not neat or obvious on paper. By adding Church of England redress payments there too, the Government is trying to close off another route by which support could have been reduced. Universal Credit is handled slightly differently, but the end result points the same way. The 2013 regulations are amended so the scheme administered under the Abuse Redress Measure 2025 sits inside the special compensation schemes already protected for Universal Credit purposes.
It is worth pausing on what these regulations do not do. They do not create the Church of England redress scheme itself, and they do not decide who qualifies for redress. What they do is make sure that, once a payment is made under that scheme, the benefits rules do not treat it like ordinary money in the usual means test. That may sound like a technical tidy-up, but it carries a clear principle. Redress for abuse is not meant to become a penalty. If support were reduced because a survivor received a redress payment, the state would be taking part of that recognition away again.
The process is also a useful lesson in how secondary legislation works. The statutory instrument says the Social Security Advisory Committee agreed the proposals did not need to be referred to it, and the Secretary of State consulted organisations representing the authorities concerned on the Housing Benefit changes. Stephen Timms signed the regulations for the Department for Work and Pensions on 8 October 2026. The explanatory note says no full impact assessment was produced because ministers expect no significant effect on the private, voluntary or public sector. For readers, the main takeaway is still the human one: if a Church of England redress payment is made under the 2025 Measure, the benefits named here are supposed to ignore it from 31 October 2026, or from a later start date if section 12 comes into force later.