MORE organisations will be forced to hand over parents’ details as the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) looks to crack down on people who won’t pay up.
The CMS has been handed new powers to enable it to more easily trace the parent who should be paying towards their kids’ upbringing, calculate how much they owe and collect any debts.
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It will now be able to approach pension firms, the Motor Insurers’ Bureau and investment companies, as well as academy schools, to find information about parents.
The CMS is the Government body that handles child maintenance payments if parents cannot reach a private agreement.
It was established in 2012 to replace the old Child Support Agency.
In the last 12 months, it has collected or arranged £1billion for children.
It is also proposing to move more of its communication online.
Parents will be able to access information about their child’s support payments digitally, and companies will be able to respond to requests for information online, which will speed up the service.
As well as being able to access more information about parents, the CMS will also be able to take “unearned income”, including savings and investments, into account when it is calculating how much someone owes.
It is hoped that this will give a fairer representation of an individual’s wealth.
Baroness Stedman-Scott, Lords minister for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), said: “At the heart of these changes is our commitment to making sure children get the financial support they need to have the best start in life.
“We’re bringing the service into the modern age, removing barriers that can slow down cases and prevent money reaching children.”
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Who has to pay child maintenance?
If you’re the child’s parent, you have to pay maintenance even if you don’t see them.
You don’t have to arrange maintenance through the CMS – you can choose to arrange it directly with the other parent.
Paying maintenance doesn’t mean you have a right to see the child. If you’d like to see them, you should first try to agree with the person who’s looking after them.
If you don’t think you’re the child’s parent, you’ll have to prove why. You might have to pay until you can prove you’re not the child’s parent.
The CMS can only ask you to pay maintenance if all the following rules apply to you and your family:
- you’re all “habitually resident” in the UK. This means you’ve made the UK your home and intend to live here for the time being
- the child is under 16 or under 20 and in approved education
You also don’t have to pay through the CMS if you already pay maintenance for the child:
- to someone else through the CMS
- under a court order which is less than a year old
How much do I have to pay?
The CMS will make an initial assessment of what you have to pay based on what the other parents has told it, plus information from organisations including HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) or the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
It will then phone you to ask you for information to calculate exactly what you should pay.
If the CMS can’t contact you by phone, it will write to you. You have 14 days to reply.
The CMS will try to arrange a face-to-face interview with you if either:
What do the changes mean?
The latest changes give the CMS more power to find parents who should be paying child maintenance, and who aren’t.
It also gives them more ways of checking exactly how much should be paid.
They can now check with a wider variety of organisations to find out details about the parent who should be paying.
The changes also allow “unearned income” to be taken into account when the calculations are being made.
This means that savings and investments could count towards how wealth you are perceived to be when calculating payments.
And the CMS has said it will now write off very small debts of less than £6.99 where maintenance payments have ended.
It will also write off debts where child maintenance has been deducted from a parent’s earnings but their employer has gone into administration and the outstanding arrears can no longer be recovered.
Rules surrounding how self-employed people are assessed for child maintenance payments have also changed.
If you are self-employed, you used to have to provide specific evidence for your estimated income for the coming year.
But now, parents will be able to give a figure for their projected earnings which will be checked later with HMRC.
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