Household qualifications lost under the context budget

Review date: 21 September 2026. Model-authored source and implementation review; not specialist acceptance or current legal advice. No source, profile, generated index or frozen trial was changed for this review. No obligation is newly closed.

What was found

The Staff012 trial already had access to the captured guidance distinguishing one partner from both partners living permanently in a care home. The pages were present in the frozen full corpus and semantic index, and reachable through existing relationships. The assembled package omitted them to meet its byte budget while retaining the project-authored household summary and the statutory regulation 5 body.

This is a context selection and declared-dependency gap. Acquiring the same manual again would not resolve it. The package correctly remains insufficient and truncated; that overall warning does not ensure that each surviving interpretation is accompanied by its controlling qualifications.

Staff012 asks: “Does Pension Credit stop is a citizen moves into a care home permanently if they are self-funding?” The original wording is preserved. Household status, benefit components, funding, qualifying-benefit payment and relevant dates remain unresolved.

Immutable evidence reviewed

The frozen trial manifest binds DWP commit 3ef0e786e9a18e76fa17c7d925ff509d6d6c9f84 and Explorer commit 0e6a639f87c4060123b72d82c1ebe30405d475f1.

The context identity is urn:sha256:b83bb636c3fbef3669b4aba03eb6cc3e4a5adda2b6e1ab50990a625e32893771. Its recipe binds https://example.test/monday-corpus/manifest.json with digest bedb2795b5579c55814b1367cc6fc04ff6f8eb681eba42a4120120e1da286c57. That URL is the offline replay identity, not a public evidence service. The context identity, serialised file digest and recipe-manifest digest have different purposes and must not be interchanged.

Guidance dates and extraction

The retained Chapter 77 PDF is the official DWP attachment. Its SHA-256 is 0528f2fb95ac3bd71bdff0d91cdaba5df76ab4260396ca99608c840004ff5708. The whole-page extraction has SHA-256 f7c34c30310a5e1f4700fb00b291e2bdec89554a89d4c244a9762c16c7448f19.

The retained inventory records:

• capture at 15 September 2026, 14:21:01 UTC;
• HTTP Last-Modified of 4 June 2025, 10:05:39 GMT for the PDF;
• parent publication update of 20 July 2026, 16:39:55 BST.

These are distinct acquisition and publication observations. None establishes the commencement, continuing applicability or amendment status of an individual paragraph. The extraction uses pdftotext -layout -enc UTF-8, has not had specialist review and uses one-based PDF page indices. The full-DMG inventory reuses this pilot acquisition; its files remain under source/pages and source/pdf.

Statutory version

The selected statutory record is https://chris-page-gov.github.io/okf-dwp/id/legal-body/uksi/2002/1792/regulation/5, linked to regulation 5 at the requested 20 September 2026 version.

• Capture: 2026-09-20T21:29:53.614046+00:00.
• Observed HTTP body hash: 898e58d6e6bea9fe234d531c65570a1019c74aaa2ba6b43a0d717d7dbb0db35d. The original response is not retained publicly.
• Retained lossy XML-tree projection hash: 222f597a3505ae3be047795bfd0d9b72d36a76e6b9e2004b9422666be5c58def.
• Extracted statutory text hash: e43e6faad06f6487f72144734d193c740073afd95e07e61a397b84f73b7aabfb.

The requested version date is not a commencement finding. Territorial extent, amendment reconciliation and applicability remain unestablished. The selected wording of regulation 5(1)(b) refers to permanent residence by the person or claimant. This review does not independently resolve that provision's legal interaction with the guidance's one-partner/both-partners branches or the cited judgment.

Controlling qualifications in the captured guidance

For the tables below, id: means the stable prefix https://chris-page-gov.github.io/okf-dwp/id/. These are identifiers, not newly authored propositions of law.

The core four pages have these literal text hashes, as recorded in the frozen semantic index:

This supports a source-qualified distinction between the one-partner and both-partners branches. It does not establish a claimant's household status, an award or a definitive statutory interpretation.

Existing graph and the budget proof

The graph already contains the following path. These are model-derived research navigation assertions, not official DWP assertions:

flowchart TD
    Care[Care-home concept] -->|skos:related| Household[Household-separation concept]
    Household -->|dcterms:references| P21[PDF 21: DMG 77117]
    Household -->|dcterms:references| P23[PDF 23: DMG 77121]
    Household -->|dcterms:references| P24[PDF 24: DMG 77128–77130]
    Household -->|dcterms:references| P25[PDF 25: example continuation and 77131]

Exact assertion identifiers use id:assertion/staff-semantic/ plus:

The four page records have no outgoing assertions in this semantic index. Their textual paragraph and judgment references should not be reported as already implemented traversal edges.

The frozen Staff012 package has a maximum of 262,144 bytes, 64 nodes, 128 relationships and depth 6. It retains 35 records and 50 relationships, uses 257,861 bytes, and reports evidence_status: insufficient and budget.truncated: true. Its budget.omissions explicitly contains a byte_budget entry for each of pages 77/21, 77/23, 77/24 and 77/25: a whole item was omitted to meet the package budget.

The surviving staff-domain/household-separation record still states the one-partner/both-partners distinction. Of its eight linked guidance pages, only 77/20 and 78/25 survive. Pages 77/7, 77/19, 77/21, 77/23, 77/24 and 77/25 do not. Its authored provenance and status remain visible, but the primary-source material establishing the distinction is absent from the package.

The same mechanism affects other selected authored concepts:

This table records dependency exposure, not a finding that every omitted page is necessary for every possible statement. A claim needs explicit, bounded qualification dependencies rather than an assumption that all navigation links establish evidence completeness.

Why the declared requirements did not protect the pages

The frozen id:requirement/staff/staff-012 requires only the original candidate pages 78/25, 78/58 and 77/20, their declared paths, and five deliberately unresolved obligation IDs. Its prose discusses the added household branches, but its machine-readable required-page list does not include them.

At the inspected producer version, scripts/build_staff_semantic.py derives required from the original candidate_ids. Additional concept source pages become traversable records; they do not automatically become profile requirements. This is the domain-side mismatch between the expressed review scope and the declared evidence dependency.

In the frozen Explorer engine, applicable requirements are calculated after breadth-first traversal. Byte trimming removes the last inserted selection, removes its incident relationships, and refreshes requirement diagnostics. It does not reserve room for declared required paths before optional expansion. These are generic allocation behaviours; they should not be corrected by encoding DWP paragraph numbers in Explorer.

Explorer already supports dcterms:requires as well as dcterms:references, and has missing-dependency diagnostics. However, trimming removes incident relationships, so a removed dependency edge must not erase the original dependency obligation. Requirements and dependency checks need to refer to the declared graph, not only the surviving relationship list.

Smallest proposed additive change

These are implementation proposals, not changes made by this review:

1. Declare the household qualification group in authored data. For the proposed one-partner/both-partners explanation, require the existing whole-page records 77/21, 77/23, 77/24 and 77/25. Add 77/19 when asserting the domestic-establishment meaning and 77/7 when explaining the couple definition. Keep regulation 5 as a distinct statutory source whose interpretation remains unreconciled.
2. Compile those declarations into existing required and required_paths fields. Reuse the existing skos:related and dcterms:references paths. Where a record-level dependency is useful, the already-supported dcterms:requires predicate is sufficient; no new legal predicate is needed. Any new assertion must retain model-derived/project-authored status and source provenance.
3. Allocate explicit requirements before optional expansion. Give the generic assembler the declared dependency closure early enough to budget for it. Keep page 24 with page 25's example continuation. Do not automatically promote every navigation reference to a required dependency.
4. Fail closed at the affected interpretation. If the qualification group cannot fit, retain precise missing-dependency diagnostics. Either omit the dependent authored interpretation or clearly identify its missing primary-source support. An overall insufficient status alone is too easy for a consumer to overlook.
5. Add a regression and a new versioned trial. Verify that the controlling pages and their paths survive, or that their absence prevents presenting the interpretation as supported. Check that an authored summary cannot silently outlive its declared evidence dependencies. Keep the existing frozen trial, source hashes and failed/successful observations unchanged.

Obligations affected and still open

The proposed change would reduce the household-qualification portion of:

https://chris-page-gov.github.io/okf-dwp/id/obligation/staff/staff-012/evidence_closure_unverified/source-requirement-1

It would not close that obligation: qualifying-benefit payment, funding/timing, housing exceptions, other cross-references and legal reconciliation remain. Shared care-home profiles may benefit, but each needs its own declared scope and verification.

These Staff012 obligations remain unchanged and open:

• applicability_unresolved/applicability — regime, date and territory;
• legal_version_unreconciled/legal-version — provisions, amendments and judgments, including the absent R(IS) 1/99 body;
• independent_review_pending/meaning-review — an attributable specialist decision on the exact version;
• question_scope_unresolved/question-scope — including whether one or both partners live in the home.

Knowing which facts and source branches are needed does not establish those facts. This review makes the evidence-selection failure reproducible and proposes a reusable remedy; it does not settle entitlement or legal applicability.

Additive authoring implementation

This section preserves the initial eight-dependency checkpoint. The later care-home component increment adds housing-cost and temporary-residence support, giving 15 dependencies in the current source candidate. The initial counts and verification below are historical, not a description of the later source or public deployment.

Following the review, a separate candidate implements the authored part of the proposal. The original frozen context and the findings above remain unchanged. Integration with the revised generic allocator and a new context evaluation are separate checks; the producer results below do not prove that a bounded assembled package now retains every required page.

The existing concept authoring accepts two optional, explicit annotations:

• required_source_ids: up to 16 distinct stable identifiers, each already in that concept's verified source selection and resolving to an evidence record;
• required_concepts: up to eight distinct concept keys, each already connected by a source-backed conceptual relationship.

The task-profile authoring accepts qualification_concepts, up to eight existing concept keys with explicit dependencies. These annotations are producer instructions for a declared context requirement. Their resulting graph assertions use the already-supported http://purl.org/dc/terms/requires predicate. No new domain predicate or Explorer index schema is introduced.

The candidate makes precisely these declarations:

The four core qualification pages are 77/21, 77/23, 77/24 and 77/25. They are not interchangeable with the seven-page support set for the full household definition. Page 77/19 is needed because that definition asserts the domestic-establishment meaning; page 77/7 and page 78/25 support its additional statements. The pre-existing reference to page 77/20 remains a reference and is not converted into a household dependency.

The producer emits eight source-backed, model-derived dcterms:requires assertions: one from care home to household separation and seven from household separation to evidence pages. Each profile's required paths start at the care-home concept already named in its when_all triggers, then follow the complete directed chain to the household concept and the source page. The producer does not seed an unresolved endpoint or equate a source reference with a mandatory dependency.

Original candidate_ids, question wording, original source_evidence_ids and all 203 absent obligation identifiers are preserved. The profile catalogue records the added qualification_concept_ids, qualification_evidence_ids and qualification_paths separately. Staff012 and Staff013 each have 15 required identifiers, including their five open obligations, and 11 required paths. The other 38 profiles' required identifier lists remain unchanged.

The producer rejects malformed or duplicate declarations, unknown concepts, required sources outside the concept's verified evidence, non-evidence targets, unbacked concept associations, cycles and qualification concepts unreachable from the profile triggers. It also enforces the existing context limits on required identifiers, path count and path depth.

At this initial checkpoint, other care-home summaries' complete qualification sets were not declared. The later component follow-up adds housing-cost and temporary-residence support. The larger disability-addition and severe-disability overview sets remain open. Neither increment reconciles regulation 5 with judgments or closes a legal or specialist-review obligation.

Producer verification

The locked environment and documented commands were used:

uv sync --locked
uv run --locked python scripts/build_staff_semantic.py
uv run --locked python scripts/build_staff_semantic.py --check
uv run --locked python -m unittest discover -s scripts -p test_staff_semantic.py

The 29 producer controls pass. They include the exact seven-page closure, resolved-root directed paths, the page 24/page 25 example continuation, one-partner/both-partners source wording, negative declaration controls, preserved source evidence and the unchanged 203 obligations. The existing Explorer validateContextIndex validator also accepts the generated output. The candidate has 901 records, 1,435 assertions, eight qualification assertions and two qualification profiles. All 40 profiles remain labelled insufficient. No combined Reader or frozen bundle was rebuilt by this change.

Verified joint qualification retention, 21 September 2026

The new joint comparison uses immutable DWP 7f9feb9634e3d94004853b838462aca132c505a5 and Explorer c4f2de0a99b7bc2f8b8c8a06a3c715fb56b66d8e, alongside their earlier source/engine controls. All 320 assemblies and deterministic replay pass. The final pair retains all seven household support pages for Staff 012 and Staff 013 at both 256 KiB and 512 KiB. It retains all 433 activated declared path occurrences and 177 known candidate occurrences across the 40 cases.

At 256 KiB each care-home package has 27 records and 63 relationships; at 512 KiB it has 62 records and 124 relationships, with an explicit missing optional temporary-care-home → page/78/0024 dependency. The separate current 64 KiB Staff 012 control returns a 1,926-byte metadata_budget refusal, with no selected records. These new results neither alter the original trial package described above nor upgrade its model answer. All 203 obligations remain open, and the larger component support sets remain backlog work. Protected publication and fresh exact-version public checks are pending.