I’ve been reading a bit on the UK recently, and it would help if I could get an explanation of just how child support works there (most in England, but if the laws differ in Scotland or Wales or NI, that too). What is expected of a non-custodial father? Do the courts arrange these things, and how? What is done if the father does not contribute to his child’s welfare?
Thanks…
I give you the much applauded (and soon to be completely overhauled due to it’s apparent ineptness) Child Support Agency…
Anecdotal only but apparently it’s crap and fails to collect when it should.
Scrap the ‘anecdotal only’. It’s crap and fails to collect.
As a minor digression, their latest wheeze is to put up a website naming and shaming parents (fathers) who are refusing to pay support.
They reckon it will take them a few months to get it up and running (eh ? we are talking a few days work max)
What they have not considered is that recalcitrant fathers would probably be quite pleased to be ‘named and shamed’ - well some of them dress up in super hero costumes and climb buildings in order to get newspaper and television publicity, so getting on the CSA website is hardly a downer.
It does make one wonder who comes up with these bright ideas …
More anecdote, this time on the other side of the coin: guy I used to work with split up with his wife, who “amicably” kept custody of their young son. He paid support to the wife, but gave her money in cash and foolishly didn’t get receipts. A year later wifey decided no longer to be amicable, went to the CSA, who decreed that he should have been paying child support (an amount less than he’d already been giving her per month) - but including a year’s back-payments. He refused to do this, because he’d already paid. CSA got a court order out, wifey testified that he’d never given her a penny, he refused to budge, and ended up spending two weeks in jail.
You have completely mischaracterised the Fathers for Justice campaign group. They had nothing at all to do with Child Support issues, but were entirely about fair access for both parents, and were protesting about a Family Court system that is secretive and (in their opinion) biased towards mothers who wished to cut fathers out of childrens lives. In particular, it appears much easier to have restrictive orders towards fathers enforced (reducing access), than to have permissive orders enforced (when mothers refuse to allow legally sanctioned access rights). Also, named fathers have no rights to enforce paternity confirmation if the mother refuses the test. Fathers for Justice may have been publicity hungry, but they closed down and cooperated with police as soon as some extreme fringe elements suggested an operation that was both significantly illegal (kidnapping as opposed to publicly disruptive protest) and posed a significant danger to someone (attempting to grab the PM’s baby would probably have ended with someone being killed by a protection officer, and may have led to escalation). They might have looked like clowns but they were determined to make a public point with a measure of dignity. I have a great deal of sympathy of their position.
Which I don’t have for either the CSA or for parents who avoid their financial responsibilities.
However, naming and shaming is going to be useless - nonpaying fathers have no shame, and in general don’t care. The whole thing should be handed over to the Revenue (who are VERY goood at taking other peoples money), payments taken at source, and standardized payments made to eligible parents regardless of nonpayment at the other end - this would create an incentive for the Govt to track down and get money off absent parents, to balance the books.
Si
@si_blakely
Perhaps I was too flippant there, thanks for clarifying the FFJ position, also I had not heard about their disbanding.
I am not so sure about using the Inland Revenue, there are practical problems and I don’t think that they are really geared up to locating people who have gone self employed.
My understanding is, that like just about everything our UK government does with computers, their system stinks, probably aggravated by using temporary staff (as in Farm Payments) in order to make the headcount figures look Ok.
Controversially I would probably opt for forgetting about the CSA and not bothering attempting to collect maintenance, people who really don’t want to pay will duck out of the system which reduces the tax take, and tying access to payments could reduce the acrimony between the parents.
I knew one guy who refused to pay, supposedly on principle but he was also skint, he went to jail and died a few months later. Exeunt one architect who had been a pretty good tax payer.
I suppose I’m saying why bother trying to do something that is self defeating.
Thanks everyone, very interesting. Please keep it coming!
If Her Majesties Revenue and Customs can’t find people to take money off them, then who can. It is their sole purpose, and (in my experience) damn good at it. It’s a wonder that Carousel Fraud actually works, given that HMRC are tighter than a nuns arse when it comes to actually releasing money.
As someone who has lived off Govt IT projects for several years, this is a fairly good summation of the situation. I will say that I’ve been involved in fairly successful ones, and the big failures are due to civil servants and ministers not understanding the scale and complexity of the solution, and too much “oh, shiny - can we have that too” scope creep.
And kids miss out, or become pawns in a financial powerplay that the nonresident parent usually wins because of higher earning capacity. I’ve seen that game being played, and it sucks for the kids and the lower earner (usually mothers). A winning solution is the one that was used in NZ - all support was paid via a working govt agency. Payments to resident parents were made at a standard rate regardless of contributions, and NZ Inland Revenue collected from nonresident parents (at source if needed). And they were very good at it. The idea was that no matter what the parents were doing, the kids should not miss out.
Si