Hi Dampsquid
Thank you for your post. I am William the
child maintenance Options consultant. I will provide some information that may help answer your query.
The Child Support Agency (CSA) are no longer accepting new child maintenance applications. These are now being managed by the Child Maintenance Service.
You mentioned that you have a family-based arrangement in place with your wife. Many parents find that this type of child maintenance is the most flexible and amicable way of agreeing and maintaining an arrangement. There are also no strict rules to stick to. Therefore, both you and your wife have the freedom to decide the terms of your own arrangement, such as how your child maintenance will be calculated.
Your family-based arrangement can include both money and other kinds of support, such as you directly paying for the things that your child may need. Family-based arrangements are not legally-binding, however, they can easily be reviewed, such as if you or your wife’s circumstances change. You can find more information on family-based arrangements on our website at
www.cmoptions.org/en/family/index.asp.
If you would like to renegotiate your family-based arrangement, you may find our page on talking about child maintenance useful (
www.cmoptions.org/en/family/talking.asp). If you feel that
mediation may help you renegotiate your family-based arrangement, you can find more information on this process on our website at
www.cmoptions.org/en/separating/about-mediation.asp.
We have a range of tools and guides that you can use to help keep your family-based arrangement amicable (
www.cmoptions.org/en/toolbox/index.asp. These include our discussion guide which you can use to help you plan your conversations around child maintenance. We also have a family-based arrangement form that is not a legally-binding document, but if used to write down what both of you have agreed, it can help to formalise your arrangement.
To give you an indication of how much child maintenance that may be calculated if you were to use the Child Maintenance Service, we have an online calculator on our website at
www.cmoptions.org/en/calculator/. Some parents use the figure provided when renegotiating child maintenance for a family-based arrangement.
If you wanted to use the statutory rules that are employed by the Child Maintenance Service for your arrangement, child maintenance is worked out using the paying parent’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. They also take other factors into account, such as the number of nights per year the paying parent will have the child or children that child maintenance will be paid for. You can find more information on how the Child Maintenance Service works out child maintenance on Gov.uk at
www.gov.uk/how-child-maintenance-is-work...ut-child-maintenance.
For more information on the ways to set up child maintenance, please visit our website at
www.cmoptions.org. Alternatively, you can call us free on 0800 988 0988 between 8am and 8pm Monday to Friday or 9am and 4pm on a Saturday.
Regards
William
