Child Maintenence - Make Sure Your Voice is Heard!
Many of you will be aware from our previous communications, that the Government have been consulting on the introduction of new tougher sanctions for those who fail to pay their assessed Child Maintenance in full. These sanctions include confiscating passports, taking funds from joint accounts with new partners, docking money to be paid in benefits and, eventually, state pensions, etc. They also propose to alter the way they assess the amount due so as to include many forms of unearned income. The proposals include plans to write-off much of the historic Child Maintenance arrears, dating back over 20 years. We suspect that this may be the deeper reason for these proposals and that they feel the need to be seen to be tough whilst writing-off debt that is sitting on the books. Fuller details of plans are contained in this briefing for MPs can be found in the link here.
There has been an element of revolving doors with ministers in the role of Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Family Support, Housing and Child Maintenance. Caroline Dinenage MP and then Kit Malthouse MP and now Justin Tomlinson MP have each held the role within the last year. We have met with all three ministers, the latest one last week. It does mean that ministers are likely to be following the views of the Treasury, points that best suit the department itself with strands of policy based on whose voices are politically the loudest. Justin Tomlinson MP has only been in the role since 9th July 2018 so we were grateful for an early meeting with him. His previous experience has been working with people with disabilities.
In meeting with Justin Tomlinson MP, we found the minister in listening mode, perhaps rather more interested in how shared-care arrangements worked than in matters relating to affordability, other than that the thresholds for paying a % of income had not been reviewed for 20 years. On shared care, there was a sense of him trying to understand better why a 4/3 days a week split of time resulted in an assessment of CM of 4/7 of the full amount.
