Hi Dan.
Thank you for your post. I am William the
child maintenance Options consultant.
We are a different organisation to the Child Support Agency (CSA) but I will try and point you in the right direction.
Any Consent Orders that were endorsed after March 2003 are not legally subject to change unless they have been in place for at least 12 months. As your Consent Order has been in place for more than 12 months, either you or your ex-partner can apply to the CSA and the Consent Order will no longer be valid.
If an application is made to the CSA, they have two schemes available. You can set up a Direct Pay arrangement, which is where the CSA calculates child maintenance but you and your ex-partner agree how payments will be made. Once they have calculated the maintenance amount, the CSA will not contact either of you again unless someone''s circumstances change or they are told that you have missed or fallen behind with your payments.
Under the CSA''s Collect and Pay service they calculate, collect and enforce payments on a parent''s behalf, as some people prefer the security and help of third party involvement. If an application is made to the CSA, your responsibility to pay will start from around the time that the CSA contact you. If you have got any further questions about the CSA you can speak to them directly. This website
www.gov.uk/child-support-agency provides their contact details.
Having said that, if you and your ex-partner are able to discuss and negotiate, you may choose to try and sort out child maintenance between yourselves. It can be the quickest and easiest way of arranging child maintenance, and we call it a family-based arrangement.
This type of arrangement is simply an agreement between the two of you about who will provide what for your children. A family-based arrangement is not legally binding but it is flexible, so it allows you and your ex-partner to negotiate an agreement that suits you both. It can include money and other kinds of support, for example providing clothes or paying for activities. A family-based arrangement is also completely private and it is made without involving the CSA or needing to disclose personal information to a third party.
If you are able to agree a family-based arrangement, you would also need to seek legal advice to see how you would cancel your Consent Order.
If you would like further information about setting up a family-based arrangement and access to useful tools and forms online you can visit
www.cmoptions.org, or if you would prefer a confidential chat you could call the Child Maintenance Options team on 0800 988 0988 (free from a landline).
