The UK Spring Statement on 26 March 2026 will announce a real-terms freeze or below-CPI uprating of Universal Credit and/or Housing Benefit, with savings explicitly or transparently linked (in the same fiscal event) to increased defence and/or infrastructure expenditure.

Step 1: Separate the compound claim. The question has two components — (A) real-terms welfare cuts/freeze occurring at all, and (B) explicit or transparent linkage to defence/infrastructure in the same fiscal event. Step 2: All four frameworks converge on (A) with mean confidence 0.66; this is the high-signal finding. Step 3: The institutionalist framework uniquely identifies that (B) — explicit offset framing — is less probable than (A). Treasury conventions disfavour bilateral transfers; the Red Book will likely present welfare parameter changes under ‘sustainability’ or ‘work incentives’ and defence/infrastructure under ‘national resilience’, creating institutional separation. This forecloses the explicit framing condition for a subset of outcomes. Step 4: Base rate calibration. UK Spring Statements that explicitly frame welfare cuts as defence/infrastructure offsets are historically rare — the 2016–2020 freeze was never framed as a defence trade-off. The Iran-Gulf escalation is a conjunctural factor that could push toward more explicit national security framing, partially counteracting Treasury convention. Step 5: The falsification criteria allow ‘transparent linkage even if Red Book separates announcements’ — this broadens the TRUE condition sufficiently that the confidence recovers toward 0.62 from the lower explicit-transfer base rate of ~0.42. Step 6: The residual uncertainty comes from: (i) whether OBR headroom arithmetic requires welfare cuts at all at this event vs. deferred to Autumn Budget, (ii) whether non-welfare offsets are available, and (iii) whether ‘transparent linkage’ is satisfied by co-announcement alone regardless of Red Book structure.