MORE than 300,000 kids whose parents have split are losing out on cash because a government body takes a cut of the payment owed.
Over half are from families where one parent has suffered domestic abuse from the other.
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The Child Maintenance Service collects and passes on payments when they can’t agree on a plan themselves or must avoid contact.
But it takes fees from both sides, so for every £100 owed, the paying parent is charged £20 extra and the receiving one gets just £96.
Laura Miller investigates the problems families are facing.
COLLECTION COSTS
THE CMS assesses how much money one parent needs to pay the other to cover a child’s costs when they split up.
Couples can decide on sums between themselves, but it’s still important to check agreements are fair using the CMS’s online calculator at gov.uk/calculate-child-maintenance.
When parents don’t agree, the CMS decides. It charges £20 for doing so, which it is meant to waive for abuse survivors, but the Sun spoke to one mum who said she still had to pay.
Parents can then avoid further fees by managing payments from one to the other through what’s called a Direct Pay deal which currently covers more than 570,000 children.
But around 300,000 kids are covered by Collect & Pay — a scheme through which the CMS passes on money.
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It’s used in disputes over payments and by survivors of domestic abuse who need to avoid contact with their abuser or to keep their location secret.
Around 60 per cent of new CMS applications are from parents who have suffered abuse, Government figures show.
But with Collect & Pay, the paying parent has to shell out an extra 20 per cent on top of what they owe and then the CMS deducts a further four per cent before passing money on.
SURVIVORS PUNISHED
GINGERBREAD, a charity that campaigns for single parents, says the costs are unfair and wants them scrapped for those who have suffered abuse.
Chief executive Victoria Benson said: “It is completely unjust that any receiving parent has four per cent of their child’s maintenance taken from them because they are forced to rely on the CMS to collect payment.”
Refuge, a charity for survivors, is calling for all Collect & Pay fees to be scrapped.
Chief executive Ruth Davison said: “Survivors of domestic abuse should not be punished through deductions from their child maintenance while trying to protect their own safety.”
Mum-of-three Ellie*, is owed almost £8,000 in child maintenance payments from her abusive ex-husband.
The 40-year-old school teacher used Collect & Pay to chase support payments for her three children, who are all under ten.
Ellie’s ex had left her with £40,000 worth of debts he’d taken out in her name.
He changed his name twice and his phone number so she couldn’t arrange child maintenance with him directly.
Repeated issues at the CMS meant it took ten months to secure any payments which were initially set at £20 per week to cover all three children.
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After the CMS took four per cent, she received only £19.20.
She couldn’t afford the rent on the family home so had to move.
“I’d become a single parent overnight and I was really struggling,” she said.
At one point her ex threatened to burn her house down, but she said the CMS did not waive the £20 set-up fee.
She says: “I explained it had been a financially controlling relationship, and provided crime reference numbers relating to death threats and damage to property.
“They told me what I’d suffered wasn’t abuse.
“It makes you feel like you’re making it up.”
The CMS has no record of Ellie disclosing abuse.
BOTH PARENTS PAY PRICE
OTHERS argue that CMS’s 20 per cent charge on the paying parent can unfairly penalise those who have not done anything wrong.
Families Need Fathers’ chair of trustees Paul O’Callaghan said: “It’s a penalty tax for not being able to arrange child maintenance outside of the CMS system, which is not always due to the paying parent.”
He added that the affordability assessment is only on the paying parent and in some cases the calculation is initially based on what the receiving parent claims the other earns.
Paul said: “It can lead to the receiving parent being on a much higher income.”
He claims there’s a “fundamental problem” with the way payments are reduced according to how many nights per week, if any, the child stays with the paying parent.
Paul said: “This incentivises the receiving parent to deny contact and the paying parent to expect more overnight contact, locking the parents into a deeply acrimonious family law court system.”
UNPAID DEBTS
Since 2012, when the CMS took over from its predecessor the Child Support Agency, more than £500million in maintenance has gone unpaid.
And the Government’s own figures suggest the rules are not being enforced.
More than a third of the 170,000 parents who had to hand over money via the Collect & Pay service in the fourth quarter of last year failed to do so.
In the same three months, none of the non-payers were sent to prison or had their driving licence or passport confiscated.
A total of 146 were given suspended prison sentences, and three were given a suspended disqualification from driving.
And Ellie’s case highlights further problems which campaigners say are widespread.
Three months after she started receiving the payments they suddenly stopped and no one at the CMS could tell her why.
“Every time I rang up they gave me a different reason,” she said.
Months later, the CMS told her that because her ex-husband had another child from an earlier relationship, his money was being paid to that woman because he was in arrears with her.
Payments resumed after a few months, but they remain erratic.
She was paid in December, for example, but not in January.
Ellie said: “You’re made to feel like you should be grateful for any scraps you get. But that money should be buying my children’s shoes.”
She added that the experience made her “feel like the financial abuse is still happening”.
POVERTY TRAP
GINGERBREAD’S Victoria Benson said: “Non-payment of maintenance contributes to the shocking level of child poverty in the UK.
“If child maintenance was paid to all children living in poverty who don’t receive financial support from their other parent, 60 per cent could escape the poverty trap.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Work and Pensions, which oversees the CMS, said its policy is to waive the £20 application fee when a parent reports any type of abuse from an ex-partner.
The DWP added: “We have recently outlined new measures to strengthen procedures.
“These include enabling the service to collect and make payments without a perpetrator’s consent, so maintenance is not used as a form of financial abuse.”
*Name has been changed
This post first appeared on thesun.co.uk
