Hi survive.
Thank you for your post. I am Sarah the
child maintenance Options consultant.
I understand that you have been trying for some time to negotiate child maintenance with your ex-partner. The agreement you currently have in place, is what we call a family-based arrangement. It 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 and can be changed as circumstances change. It can include money and other kinds of support, for example providing clothes or paying for activities.
To help you make a family-based arrangement, we have got several guides that you may find useful. We have a Child maintenance decisions: Information for parents with the main day to day care of their child guide, which gives details of the options available to you and offers information to help you with the negotiation process. We also have a Child maintenance decisions: A guide to talking about money, this provides information around discussing finances and agreeing child maintenance. You can download these from our website at:
www.cmoptions.org. We also have a Discussion guide on our website.
For an idea how much child maintenance could be worked out by the Government''s statutory service, you can use the online calculator that is available on our website. You may want to use this figure as a starting point to renegotiate your family-based arrangement.
If you are able to set up a child maintenance arrangement that you are both happy with, you can record the details on our family-based arrangement form. Although this is not a legally enforceable document, it puts the agreement on a more formal basis. You can complete it together with your ex-partner and sign your names to show your commitment to this arrangement. You can also download this form from our website.
Alternatively, if you think
mediation may help, Gov.uk (which is a Government website) has a service which may help you to find a mediator in your area. You can find this at:
find-legal-advice.justice.gov.uk/.
In your post you mentioned the Child Support Agency (CSA), which is one of the Government''s statutory child maintenance services. The Government has now introduced a new statutory service called the Child Maintenance Service and parents with two or more children will use this service rather than the CSA. The two statutory services run different schemes which use slightly different rules. Therefore, if you wanted to use a statutory service, or wanted to find out how much they may calculate for you to pay, you will need to use the Child Maintenance Service and their rules.
The Child Maintenance Service would work out child maintenance using your ex-partner''s gross income, which is income before Income Tax and National Insurance are taken off, but after occupational or personal pension scheme contributions are taken away. In most cases this gross income figure comes from information given to HM Revenue and Customs by your ex-partner, his employer or a third-party such as an accountant.
You can ask the Child Maintenance Service to look at certain types of your ex-partner''s income that are not included in the main rules they use to work out child maintenance. This is called ‘additional income’ and can increase his gross income figure. Examples of this include applying for an ‘additional income variation’ for ‘unearned’ income – such as rental income from property or land, or dividends and interest from savings and investments. This type of income must be at least £2,500 a year.
The rules around variations can be complex and are often specific to a person''s circumstances. For further information about this, and how the Child Maintenance Service calculate maintenance, you may wish to look online at
www.gov.uk/child-maintenance. You may find their guide called ''How child maintenance is worked out'' particularly useful. You can view this by clicking on the following link,
www.gov.uk/how-we-work-out-child-maintenance.pdf.
The Child Maintenance Service has two maintenance options available. Direct Pay is where the Child Maintenance Service will make a maintenance calculation and then allow you and your ex-partner to decide on how payments will be made. Once they have calculated the maintenance amount, the Child Maintenance Service will not contact either of you again unless someone''s circumstances change or your ex-partner falls behind or misses his payments.
The Collect and Pay service, is where they calculate, collect and enforce payments on your behalf, as some people prefer the security and help of third party involvement. If you decide to use the statutory maintenance service in the future, your ex-partner''s responsibility to pay will start from around the point that he is contacted by the Child Maintenance Service.
It is worth noting that the Government plans to introduce costs for using the Child Maintenance Service at some point in the future. There will be three types of costs. These are an application fee, fees for collecting and paying out child maintenance payments, and enforcement charges for paying parents who do not pay. We do not know the exact amount of these costs yet or when they might be introduced as they still need to be approved by Parliament but the Child Maintenance Service will write to everyone with a case to confirm the exact amounts a least a month before they come in.
You can avoid costs by making your own family-based arrangement with your ex-partner. If you try it and it does not work out, you can still apply to the Child maintenance Service at any stage.
To make an application with the Child Maintenance Service you will need to contact your local CSA office. You can find these contact details using the following link,
www2.dwp.gov.uk/csa/v2/en/contact/index.asp.
We also have a sorting out separation web-app that you may find useful, it offers help and support to separated families. The link is:
www.wikivorce.com/divorce/Sorting-Out-Separation.html.
To find out more about how Child Maintenance Options can help you visit cmoptions.org or call us free on 0800 988 0988 between 8am and 8pm Monday to Friday or 9am and 4pm on Saturday.
