Anyone think the UK is a joke when it comes to not paying child maintenance?

[SleepDreamThinkHuge]

You hear a lot of stories especially in the UK where courts are not that strict on individuals who are no longer together to pay maintenance for their child. Unlike the UK, USA is much more stricter and it is much harder to avoid paying child maintenance.

Anyone think the rules need to be a lot stricter in the UK? How can it be better enforced in the UK and what is the minimum amount a month you think someone should pay for maintenance assuming someone is on around £1.5k-£2k after tax a month.

What happens in the States if they don’t have a driving licence?

owed by the parent who withdrew their financial, physical & emotional support from their children
Let's be clear here @AlienatedChildGrown leaving your husband or wife does not equal removing your financial, physical and emotional support from your children. Clearly from your username you've had a bad experience but let's not tar everyone with the same brush. Plenty of parents who don't live with their children ft manage to provide all those kinds of support.

If men chose instead to have 24/7 care of their DC half of every week they wouldn't need to be hounded by anybody.
Except far far less than 21% men want to be bothered with that.

I wonder what percentage of women would allow that to be fair @cptartapp ?

I'm not sure I know many women who'd give up half of custody.

@ChiselandBits I didn’t mean to sound like I’d want the benefits a RP receives to be dependent on the NRP paying. I meant that the parent with the children would get their money regardless, and then HMRC or some sort of CMS would claim it back from the NRP and it would remain a lifelong debt if not paid.

I think NI numbers should be linked to birth certificates and any non payment of maintenance covered by the state and reclaimed against the state pension etc.
It's totally unacceptable to that so many kids are left in poverty because of these dickheads and then successive governments wring their hands and witter on about the latest exciting "initiative" to tackle child poverty. How about we cut the crap and get the money to the absolute heart of the issue?

It’s a joke, in other countries salaries get taken, people even get sent to prison for not paying for their children.

I know someone who’s kids dad pays nothing as he insisted on 50/50. Guess who pays for all clothes/ school trips/ clubs and has him most of the time as he would actually rather spend time with his loving Mother than his shitty dad?

YANBU. We should have started collecting it through tax codes a long time ago. We have real time tax now so even less excuse.

@cptartapp

That's a ridiculous statement. Do you really think every man who pays maintenance has chosen to not live with his children or have 50/50 care?

They should just use the powers they have 5 years my arrears having been stacking up whilst ex changes jobs. Goes self employed and moves house. Why they don't just take it from his bank account I've no idea. He would soon be on to them if they did to sort it out

@ClocksGoingBackwards oh I agree with that. Re the 50/50 thing..I would 100% happily share 50/50 with my ex but he doesn't want it. And the 4 single mums I know, all of us work professional full time roles and would have immeasurably less stressful lives if our exes stepped up but literally none of them want to and have actually withdrawn most meaningful support by opting for EOW contact and setting up their lives so that the kids have to fit round them, not the other way round, so not infrequently contact is changed, reduced, swapped etc and the RP is absolutely on the hook for the relentless day to day everything of parenting.
These threads always go the same way, with 'whattabouttery" abounding but the stats overwhelmingly show that 90% of nrps are male and billions are owed in child support. Of course some nrps are female and of course some nrps are hard done by but none of that changes the basic truth of huge underpayment and lack of enforcement.

If somebody had not withdrawn their financial, physical & emotional support the solution would not be applied to them because they would not be The Problem.

Some separated parents co-parent extremely effectively. They use nesting. Work flexibly around each other’s commitments so the children’s needs always get met. Focus in the main on the family they made in order to get all the individuals through a significant life change and beyond with a few dents of small souls as possible. Take their responsibility towards their children, and the other parent the children love, very very seriously.

They may need some extra state support due to what was a stretched income even before additional housing (+bills) were required. But these are diligent, responsible people who I don’t believe for a moment would begrudge a solution being found for children far, far less fortunate than their own.

Isn’t the main problem more with self-employed parents where payment is reliant on truthful declaration of income, and unemployed parents, where there’s no income to take meaningful payments from?

It seems to be little known that the UK’s Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008 made provision for non-paying parents to have their driving license or passport revoked for up to two years for being wilfully in arrears with child maintenance payments - it’s just very rarely invoked. (It also doesn’t happen as frequently as many people seem to think it does in the US: only some states legislate for it and it’s very much seen as an absolute last resort and wilful refusal to pay has to be proven first.)

@AlienatedChildGrown we both know you suggested that anyone leaving the family home was doing that.

Nesting is a ridiculous idea. Nice to fantasize about but confusing and damaging in reality.

If you can work, earning capacity needs to be taken into account. Ex has a professional degree but changed jobs to a NMW job at 20hrs a week in order to reduce his CM to £17. Contact one or two nights a month.
He also had a (one of many) court hearing specifically to add into the child arrangement order that I must provide all clothing, shoes, uniforms, clubs, trips because he pays CM.

Who's to decide what someones earning capacity is though?

It wouldn't be fair to say all nrps have to work ft to a certain salary, and rps can essentially do what they want.

I'm interested in whether the US system has changed recently.

When a friend of mine split up with her American husband (she was English and they lived in the US) he didn't pay any child support. She took him to court, got a court order for him to pay £x and then he moved to a different state and she had to start all over again.

In the end I think he moved state about 4 times and she gave up because she couldn't afford to keep taking him to court. That was about 20 years ago, so things may well have changed.

Your mind reading powers are less effective than you believe them to be.

Nesting requires the parents to undertake the burden currently borne by the children. Which is why it remains, and will remain, wholly unpopular with the vast majority of the adults in the equation.

Any solution that solidly centres the financial, physical & emotional well being of the children in the context of parental separation will fail to garner the necessary support from the adult population that is required to make it policy, let alone law.

I’ve thought similar for a long time. Never been personally affected, but have friends who get the bare minimum their kids’ fathers can get away with. Hard working mothers, not only bearing the financial burden, but the practical one too.

One of the fathers has been more generous to the offspring of one of the women he shacked up with than with his own. And he wonders why as teens, they’re not interested in spending time with him. Who is raising these men?

If it's blatantly obvious that people are playing tricks like that. He had no reason to go from full time to 20 hours.

Any solution that solidly centres the financial, physical & emotional well being of the children in the context of parental separation will fail to garner the necessary support from the adult population that is required to make it policy, let alone law

Its not a case of I wouldn't do that or don't think those things are important, it's that I don't agree at all that it actually provides those things at all.

I think it's entirely confusing for the children, financially worse because you'd need three houses rather than two, and it's much much worse emotionally because I think even the most amicable exes would find it extremely hard. An unhappy parent is not best to support a child no matter how you frame it. Its absolutely insane to say it puts the needs of the child first, it absolutely does nothing of the sort.

In that single scenario yes @daffodilandtulip (although there could be a myriad of reasons why he did it in fairness) but you can't tar all nrps with the same brush. Its a slippery slope. Nobody should be forced to work ft. I say that as someone who does!

I get £28 plus change a month which comes from him claiming universal credit. He owns and run a business, no tax ever paid. I have complained non stop to CMS, said investigating him which can take upto a year, even though I've I've providing them with evidence of his business for years. He was taken to court in 2020 for arrears, but because he is no claiming a benefit they can't touch him. Total system is a joke and not fit for purpose.

@cptartapp and @ChiselandBits totally agree. Amongst my single mum friends we would all be happy to split care 50/50 but all the dads have gone for every other weekend to fit around their new families and girlfriends.