Dear Trigirl
Thank you for your post, I am William the
child maintenance Options consultant. It is possible to change the terms of your Consent Order but to do this you will need to get legal advice. This usually results in going back to court to set out the application on a standard form. The court will then consider any changes.
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. After 12 months, either parent can apply to the Child Maintenance Service and the Consent Order will no longer be valid. However, if a Consent Order dates back to before April 2003, then law does not allow parents to change over to the Child Maintenance Service. Only the courts can arrange child maintenance in such circumstances.
Under child support legislation, regular child maintenance payments must be made until a child is 16 years old, or 20 if they are in full-time, non-advanced education (A-level or equivalent), or for as long as Child Benefit is being paid. Before 10 December 2012, the upper age limit was 19.
However, if your child was 19 after this date and in full-time education, maintenance would be paid until the age of 20. In addition, if arrears have built up on a case, those arrears must still be paid, even if regular child maintenance payments have stopped. When a child leaves full-time education in the summer, Child Benefit generally continues until the first week of September.
If an application were made via the Child Maintenance Service, they would calculate the maintenance payments based on the paying parents gross weekly income. The Child Maintenance Service has four different maintenance rates and the rate that is to be paid is dependent on the gross weekly income of the paying parent. The four different rates are as follows:
- Basic rate is for parents with a weekly gross income of between £200 and £799.99 (and Basic Plus for parents with a gross weekly income of £800 or more)
- Reduced rate is for parents on a weekly gross income of between £100 and £199.99
- Nil rate is where parents are in full-time education, under sixteen, in prison or living in care
- Flat rate is when parents pay a flat rate of £7 child maintenance per week, no matter how many children they have, if their weekly gross income is between £7 and £100. This also applies if the partner they live with is in receipt of Income Support, income-based Jobseeker''s Allowance or Pension Credit.
You can find further information regarding the different rates online at
www.gov.uk/child-maintenance. If you have got any questions about how they calculate maintenance, or if you would like more details about their service, you may wish to speak to the Child Maintenance Service directly.
We have a sorting out separation web-app that you may find useful, it offers help and support to separated families. You can find this at
www.wikivorce.com/divorce/Sorting-Out-Separation.html.
If you would a confidential chat with Child Maintenance Options team or find out more about all the options available for child maintenance, you can call us free on 0800 988 0988 between 8am and 8pm Monday to Friday or 9am and 4pm on Saturday, alternatively you can visit our website at
www.cmoptions.org.
William
