PRESS RELEASE

28^th November 2017 - for immediate release

Universal Credit doesn’t take into account statutory Child Maintenance payments and is pushing non-resident parents into poverty

Families Need Fathers comments on today’s Heidi Allen 10 minute Rule Bill

 Today Heidi Allen MP presented a 10 Minute Rule Motion - Child Maintenance (Assessment of Parents' Income). In presenting her bill she makes generalised and unsupported assertions that non-resident parents are registering as self-employed in order to avoid child support liabilities.

FNF does not support evasion of Child Maintenance but beyond Ms Allen’s anecdotal examples, believes not only that there is negligible evidence that self-employment is being used as a loophole for avoiding child support responsibilities but there is a major blindness  to the impoverishment of many non-resident parents.

FNF Chair, Jerry Karlin, said today “in considering this Bill, MPs must take into account that there are almost 5m self-employed people, most of whom are on very low and irregular incomes and who may genuinely have insufficient funds to live above the poverty line once Child Maintenance has been assessed using the current inflexible CMS formula. These problems are exacerbated by the roll out of Universal Credit which does not take into account Child Maintenance payments. Universal Credit was specifically supposed to iron out such anomalies for people on low income and to make work pay.”

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12^th September 2017 - for immediate release

Independent expert evidence of unfounded and false allegations of domestic abuse in family courts.

 FNF calls for independent research into the misuse of domestic abuse allegations in contact and residence cases.

"False and unfounded allegations poison proceedings when a non-resident parent is seeking parenting time with his children. Judges need to make findings of fact as soon as possible and to take false allegations into account when determining the best interests of the child."

Research into a sample of 75 Scottish family actions revealed that allegations of abuse were made in 35% of contact/residence actions and 70% were found to be false or unfounded.

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Cafcass heeds FNF’s call for mandatory training of all its case workers in Parental Alienation

14^th November 2017 - for immediate release

Families Need Fathers welcomes a new commitment by Cafcass (Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service) to introduce mandatory training in Parental Alienation among its front line caseworkers.

The commitment follows the revelation at a Parental Alienation conference organised by Families Need Fathers last month that only a minute percentage of Cafcass had completed its online training webinar on Parental Alienation.

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For immediate release 04/08/2017

Families Need Fathers (FNF) the UK's leading shared parenting charity are today releasing the transcript of Sir James Munby's speech at FNF’s recent 2017 annual conference.

In his judgment published yesterday, Sir James said in the case of child 'X' “we, the system, society, the state … will have blood on our hands”.

At our conference, Sir James – President of the Family Division - went further, identifying many flaws in family justice itself that must be fixed. He observed: 
 
that 'family courts are [becoming] a lawyer-free zone' 
(More and more people are forced to represent themselves if they can’t afford lawyers)

that we need to recognise 'the reality of parental alienation' 
(Children are being deprived of a parent by the other parent’s malicious or undermining behaviour)
 
‘One of the greatest vices of the system… is the unfounded allegation [of violence/abuse] which festers around and poisons the process.‘

 ‘we know that people game the system, and the classic example of that is one of the bits of LASPO [Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012] is you do get legal aid if there’s an allegation of domestic violence…’

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17^th October 2017 – for immediate release

Parental Alienation is a mental health welfare issue

10,000 children a year may be let down by family court professionals

Cafcass and NSPCC acknowledge that Parental Alienation is a serious issue that demands

further resources and training for practitioners and the judiciary alike

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