Shared Residency and the CSA

Good morning,

This thread may go nowhere, but I thought I might air a few experiences and views, which may either stimulate some discussion or help others.

My soon to be ex-wife decided to leave our marriage nearly a year ago, mostly for financial reasons. After a short but expensive tussle we settled on a shared residence arrangement for our 9 year old son (8:6 days in his mother''s favour plus half the school holidays). This is probably as good as I could manage for our boy, and he is pretty happy and well adjusted.

As she has claimed child benefit throughout, my STBX applied to the CSA soon after she left our home and consequently I pay her about 8% of my income in CS via the CSA. The amount is not the issue.

The CSA is a government agency which has taken upon itself to identify resident and non-resident parents, although in our case a court recognises both as being resident in a shared arrangement. It has used an arbitrary method of identifying the resident parent (receipt of family allowance) and has then chosen to pursue the party it considers to be non-resident for an arbitrary amount of money, regardless of the income of the other and the outgoings of both.

I suspect I will get round to writing to the chief executive of the CSA to point out the iniquities at some time (which will probably achieve nothing, but may make me feel better), but I wondered whether any contributors had experiences or views they wanted to share?

It seems to me that if society really does want to be equal, and to encourage fathers to be responsible then it should treat them equally, not as the family court system and the CSA does at the moment.

A_O wrote:

I suspect I will get round to writing to the chief executive of the CSA to point out the iniquities at some time (which will probably achieve nothing, but may make me feel better), but I wondered whether any contributors had experiences or views they wanted to share?

Yeah, done that - won''t do any good. The CSA obviously does what it is told to do by Parliament and follows the legislation. The Child Support Act (an off-the-shelf copy of the American system) actually allowed shared parenting; it was legislation bolted on afterwards (Regulation 20 of the Child Support (Maintenance and Special Cases) 1992 No. 1815) which demanded that of two parents with care one had to be regarded as absent. This was because the scheme was designed to raise revenue.

You will need to get your complaint in soon because the CSA is on its way out and new cases are being taken on by the CMS. I suppose you could complain to your MP, but they have all heard it before and there is no political commitment in this country to shared parenting; the establishment is wedded to the sole parenting model in which one parent cares and the other pays.

Hi,
I know it will not do any good, so perhaps I''ll just let it go.
I don''t know for sure, but I suspect the arbitrary method of deciding which parent is the resident one, and therefore which should be hounded, is not enshrined in legislation but just CSA policy.
CSA tries to sell itself as doing a public function in chasing absent fathers who will not support their children, I suspect it recovers little money in those circumstances. What it spends lots of time doing is pursuing easy targets.
Ho hum.

The resident parent is the one in receipt of Child Benefit. The parent who receives Child Benefit is the mother.

Fathers have gone to the ECHR over this and lost - the discrimination is ruled to be justified to keep administrative costs down.

I know, just live with the discrimination.

A_O wrote:

It seems to me that if society really does want to be equal, and to encourage fathers to be responsible then it should treat them equally, not as the family court system and the CSA does at the moment.

I think that''s the false premise. I have seen very little evidence of society really wanting to be equal, and I''m not only talking about family law. I''ve seen even less evidence of any political will to make much equality happen, and, to me, it seems that current government policy is predicated on increasing inequality.

It needs to be remembered that the Child Support Agency was never set up with children or supporting them in mind. It was purely to cut the growing cost of benefits that were being paid.

Indeed in the early days a PWC on benefits didn''t have a choice about whether or not to use the CSA and the money from the NRP repaid the benefits paid to the PWC first. if the PWC didn''t involve the CSA their benefits were cut to punish them.