Contact Orders and the CSA

Although your new child and your partners children will be taken into the calculation with the CSA , your child tax credits are then used as your income.

I've just outlined the position in another thread.


www.wikivorce.com/divorce/Divorce-Forum/...-children.html#90924

Angel said "Although your new child and your partners children will be taken into the calculation with the CSA , your child tax credits are then used as your income"

Angel could you please clarify what you mean by this statement, not sure quite what you are saying.

Thank you!

xx Sarah xx

The child tax credits that are awarded as a joint claim is used in the NRP's calculation, therefore if a NRP earns £900 pcm and gets £400 pcm CTC his monthly income is assessed as £1,300 pcm.

So, if we have no children together and we receive CTC purely for my children even as a joint claim, this will be classed as my partner's income. So effectively his income may actually be more even after a 25% deduction because my 5 children live with us as he is on a low income and we will receive nearly full CTC although no WTC.

I purely want to know the situation we will find ourselves in very shortly so that we know the little amount of money we will have to live on.

Will need to take a look in my booklets from the CSA to make sure I know what we will actually have to pay now.

His ex partner is on IS so we could effectively be paying money to the state and none of our 9 children getting the benefit!

I don't want to take Benefits that we are not entitled to but I believed that CTC were for the benefit of the children that were named on the award.

xx Sarah xx

Tbh i see it as fair when in effect the so called relevant children take priority in calcualtions over the bio kids .Why should the bio kids be made to live off less cos you get together with someone who has kids got to have fairness somewhere.

Having looked at the CSA website it appears that it may only be Working Tax Credits and not Child Tax Credits that are counted as income when the NRP lives with a new partner with other children. The CTC payment would be paid to me as the non-working parent and would be based on the children living in our household. As my new partner would not qualify for WTC as his income would be classed as too high (but not much above the threshold) we would only be in receipt of CTC.

Therefore, it appears that a variation would be made as we have 5 children living with us, hence a 25% reduction before working out the CSA payment payable to his ex partner for their 4 children.

I personally think that the rules of benefits and the CSA are flawed. I just need to be able to work out the amount of money we will have to live on each month.

I was not wishing to enter into a moral debate on what is or isn't right when working out the entitlement because it certainly isn't a fair system a lot of the time any way.

xx Sarah xx