What support availability means.

Support availability is whether help is actually open to this household right now. Whether it covers their county. Whether it is taking new people this month. Whether the phone number still reaches someone. It is a statement about capacity and geography, and it goes stale quickly.

Entitlement is whether they have a right to something. It comes from statute, it is decided by an agency, and it changes when the law or the income limit changes. It goes stale slowly.

Nothing on the availability side is owed to anyone. A food bank is not obliged to serve you. A volunteer driver programme can stop next month because the volunteer moved. That is not unfairness, it is what a service run on donations and goodwill actually is, and any tool that blurs it will send families to doors that do not open.

Why the distinction is not academic

The two fail in opposite directions, so they need opposite defaults.

The expensive mistake on the entitlement side is a wrong no. Tell a family they do not qualify for something they were owed, and they stop looking. They lose money nobody ever tells them about, and they never find out it happened. So entitlement rules out only on a bright line, and unknown is never rendered as ineligible.

The expensive mistake on the availability side is a stale yes. Send a family to an organisation that closed eighteen months ago, during the week they have the least capacity to absorb another dead end, and you have spent the one resource they cannot get back. So availability decays deliberately: a listing nobody has confirmed in ninety days stops claiming to be open and starts saying it is worth a call.

One system cannot hold both defaults at once without lying about one of them. That is why they are separate here, and why you see both in the same result.

The three things availability actually asks

1. Does it cover this county? County lines are invisible until they stop you. A service covering all of your county from an office forty miles away will take your call. One eight miles away across a county line will not. This is why county match outranks distance in everything we show.
2. Is it taking people? Open, waitlist, closed, or we do not currently know. Those are four different answers and we keep them four different answers.
3. When did anyone last check? A page that is online is not evidence that a programme is running. Somebody has to look, and the date they looked has to travel with the answer.

Availability is a perishable claim, and it is treated like one

Most directories publish a listing once and leave it up until someone complains. That is not a database, it is an archive of the day it was compiled. Funding cycles end, coordinators leave, programmes quietly stop taking new people, offices move. None of that produces an announcement.

So the freshness window here is ninety days, which is half what we allow on the entitlement side. Past ninety days a listing does not disappear and does not get marked closed. It stops claiming to be open, keeps its confirmed date on display, and invites the correction that refreshes it. Showing a stale listing with its date is more honest, and considerably more useful, than hiding it.

The one rule that outranks the others

Unknown is not closed. A record we stopped verifying has not shut down, we simply stopped knowing. Rendering the second as the first tells a family the only meals programme in their county is gone, when the truth is that nobody has called it since March. That is the availability twin of ruling somebody out on missing information, and it costs exactly as much.

The same applies to an empty result. If we have nothing for a county, the honest sentence is that we have not researched it yet. It is never that no help exists there, because that is a claim about the county and we have not earned it.