Occupation order and mortgage

Hello,

Great to have found this forum, looks very useful!

I have a question hopefully someone can answer. I have an occupation order in place to stop my husband entering the property.

He wants to force selling up, and has been ordered to pay half the mortgage. However he is refusing as he said the CMS covers this (4 figures) and it does indeed cover it plus a little more. However, isn't this a breach?

As for pushing the sale of the house (via solicitors) , can he ask for this whilst on an occupation order? There is also a NMO stopping harassment.

The house is jointly owned and he has always paid the mortgage.
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Grateful for any advice.

If a court has ordered that he pay half the mortgage then that’s what he must do.

What is the plan for the house? Where are you as far as the process of ending your financial ties is concerned?

Thankyou.

He is requesting mediation. I'm refusing as I don't want to deal with him in that way. However, I did agree for direct contact with him so he's suggesting there is no reason for me to refuse mediation.

Therefore, no real progress. Am I going to run it into problems if I don't co-operate?

He will have to pay half the mortgage if he has been ordered to do so but he can ask CMS to offset this from the maintenance he is paying. There was a very recent ruling making it clear that where someone has to pay towards the mortgage on the former FMH this is offset against CMS payments.

Therefore, if you pursue him for half the mortgage then be prepared for your CMS to drop by the same amount. It may not be worth pursuing.

Thank you for the reply. To be honest I'm a little shocked as I was always under the impression they didn't count the mortgage payments. Is there anywhere where this ruling is documented?

So effectively he's telling the truth (and just doesn't know it) however I suppose he still needs to perform the action of paying for the requirements of the occupation order.

EMC3419 wrote:

He will have to pay half the mortgage if he has been ordered to do so but he can ask CMS to offset this from the maintenance he is paying. There was a very recent ruling making it clear that where someone has to pay towards the mortgage on the former FMH this is offset against CMS payments.

Therefore, if you pursue him for half the mortgage then be prepared for your CMS to drop by the same amount. It may not be worth pursuing.



Do you have a link to this ruling?

It always used to be the case that you had to apply for a Variation and they would only take the payments into account if the person paying had no financial interest in the mortgaged property. CMS Variations leaflets don’t seem to have been updated yet but it is an interesting change as there were few opportunities for Variations with CMS compared with the old CSA.

Well, to be fair even the CMS were inconsistently applying their own rules but if you think about it the status quo means that non-residents could end up paying much more than they could reasonably afford if the court were applying one rule and CMS were applying another. It was also leading to too many cases of resident parents delaying divorces and then sales of the FMH so hopefully this ruling will stop that. The right and proper mechanism for top up payments is maintenance pending suit because that deducts pound for pound if the recipient receives universal credit and avoids a situation where the recipient gets too comfortable and tries to delay matters. Here is the relevant case:

financialremediesjournal.com/content/chi...85d9e80f2cf73597.htm