FNF influence Parliamentary Briefing on Child Maintenance
House of Commons Publish a Helpful Briefing on Child Maintenance
On 7th December 2021 the House of Commons Library published a new briefing paper on Child Maintenance (CM) calculations Child maintenance: Calculations, variations and income (UK), a 70 page document. The paper helpfully summarises key aspects of the way that CM is calculated and recent data published by CMS and their explanations for the reasons why certain aspects of the calculation were introduced.
FNF are mentioned at the end of this paper as a resource for MPs and their constituents.
One of the more gratifying aspects of this new briefing is the inclusion of a section (on page 47) on 'Poverty, welfare and child maintenance'. We have been lobbying the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) for some time about unaffordable assessments and the lack of information available to MPs on poverty and paying parents. For the first time this briefing includes references to research that shows that paying parents on Universal Credit can experience 'marginal tax rates' that include their CM payments of up to 109%. In other words they are being asked to pay sums they cannot afford and as their income goes up their take-home pay actually decreases so they have a disincentive to increasing their hours or pay and struggle to live.
The briefing also highlights reports on the difficulties of the current CMS scheme as reported by the Government's own statutory advisory body, The Social Security Advisory Committee (SSAC) and of the Centre for Social Justice (FNF contributed to both these reports and FNF Members and service users were involved in the focus group consultation by SSAC).
As well as the interaction with Universal Credit, MPs are briefed on other SSAC (Section 7.5 on page 39) findings such as CM:
- not reflecting the true cost of living of paying parents
- perverse incentives for receiving parents in the way shared parenting calculations work
- failure to reflect income of both parental households
- failure to accurately reflect travel costs, especially when the receiving parent moves away
- difficulties of a high barrier to reviewing CM payments when paying parents' income goes down
The inclusion of these points in this briefing is an important step forward in informing MPs on the difficulties of the current system. We shall be contacting the House of Commons Library about future updates to help MPs further in understanding the current failings of CM. Key information that remain to be covered in this briefing includes:
- The spread of income of paying parents.
We know, from FOI data, that the average income of paying parents having DWP deductions for CM from their income or benefits is just £9,200 a year. This should be included in the briefing to MPs as should a better understanding of income of those with arrears. - The briefing also should report on the conclusion of the SSAC report that the government need a proper strategy for separated parents, without which the entire scheme lacks coherence and government departments work against each other e.g. one promoting out-of-court solutions to family conflict whilst DWP often rely on court evidence and have policies that create and escalate conflict between parents.
ACTION: If you are having difficulties with CM payments and are finding the CM service unresponsive, do contact your MP. Please also consider asking them to read this briefing and consider putting forward proposals to review the legislation in the way SSAC proposed. A request to ask your MP to request that the House of Commons Library to address the two points above would also be very helpful. If you are willing to share responses from your MP's please send them to us. Also, if you wish to share your experience on any of these issues for a future Newsletter item, please get in touch - we cannot get involved with CMS in relation your case with CMS, but we can discuss with them the issues that it raises and its wider implications. Please send information on these items to us on admin@fnf.org.uk with CMS in the subject heading. We will anonymise your details.
24th December 2021
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