To think this child maintenance benefits loophole is ridiculous ?

[Strawberrrrry]

I was talking to my sister today. Love my sister, don’t begrudge my nieces and nephews etc. However, I find this benefits loophole ridiculous, though I appreciate she doesn’t make the rules and is just claiming what she can. Anyway.

My sister has just broken up with her partner, they have two kids together. He is a high earner and child maintenance will be £1,200 a month (via the child maintenance service).

She earns £900 a month working part time, school time hours.

She has just put in a claim for benefits and she has been told she will receive £1,400 a month. This includes housing benefits, income support, child benefit. It doesn’t include discounts from council tax etc.

This brings her total monthly income to £3,500 and some change (I have given rounded figures). Completely tax free. I had assumed her benefits would be reduced as she gets a high amount of child maintenance. But no. They don’t count it. She admits herself that her monthly income is massive and she did first assume that the children’s maintenance would warrant some sort of deduction.

As I said, fair play to her as she is only doing what the system allows. However, I can’t help but feel this is a huge loophole, and there should be some sort of cap i.e once you are getting £500+ a month in child maintenance, it starts to affect benefits? And I realise her ex could lose his job at any point or stop paying, but if that happens surely benefits could reassess at that point…

It just seems ludicrous that someone can be getting that level of monthly income from maintenance & benefits, completely tax free. I’m sure it can’t just be my sister in this position.

AIBU?

Working part time often isn't a choice. I would love to work full-tike but I'm a single mum with a child that has disabilities. There's no holidays or after school care that is suitable so I can only work during school hours. Lots of people will be in similar situations
Fully appreciate the necessity of only working PT in this situation but you can appreciate it is not the majority of situations.

Did you not notice that there were other women at that time who were completely fucked over by the £20 rule, then?
I never agreed with it, but the transition to being able to keep it all in addition to full benefits led ro a disincentive to work FT and contribute to a pension for parents who would have been perfe rly capable of doing so. It went too far the other way.

So did you notice all the women who were fucked over by it, then?

I wouldn’t have been able to release my ex from our joint mortgage. He would have been unable to move forward with his life and get a new mortgage as he would have been jointly liable for our mortgage. It would have remained like that until the children were 18, we had that discussion and was used in negotiations to move forward. It was in his interests to be released from the mortgage and move forward with his life so he complied and provided the letter. I was fortunate, whilst it wasn’t pleasant separating and divorcing we kept solicitors out of it and behaved like adults to untangle our joint lives together and provide stability for our children.

You have some level of control over that though, can get another job, get an additional job etc, I've been in that situation and done exactly that, if the NRP decided not to pay and there's nothing to make them, the RP is just without that money, with no way to change that under the current system.

And those changes are done in real time, as I understand it, that would have to be introduced into the CMS and benefits in the same way - which is possible, but isn't happening with no plans as I'm aware to make it happen.

I'm not saying that it shouldn't happen (which you may have gleaned from the rest of my post if you hadn't cherry picked one sentence?) I'm saying that the way the system is set up it doesn't. I'm all for it being changed and making NRP's pay their fair share of the children they created, but the way it's run at the moment doesn't allow for that. Without changing the system to being able to react quickly to sporadic payments, lower amounts and non payments, then taking the amount that's supposed to be paid from benefits is going to cause more problems than it solves when NRPs don't or won't pay.

I worked ft as a single mum, if my child's father had paid his share, I wouldn't have needed any benefits, as it was he didn't. He paid sporadically, not the right amount and then stopped all together. Without the regular tax credits and child benefit then I wouldn't have been able to regularly pay the bills that kept a roof over our heads, kept the lights and heat on and food in the cupboard, and then would have needed far more support when the concequences of that happened. The taxpayer wasn't paying my share, I was, they were paying his because he wouldn't and there was no will to make him. If what he paid was taken off the supporting benefits, it'd have saved the taxpayer around £1000 over 18 years, and probably cost more than that to administer.
I'd have been all for making him pay, unfortunately I didn't have a say in it, and I wasn't going to make my child live in poverty to prove a point.

We need to have much more robust ways of the NRP's paying consistently, the right amount and for the right amount of time before we can consider implementing taking maintenance from benefits. Paying needs to become the norm first, which it isn't.

YABU.

Child maintenance is for the child, to give the child the same standard of living as their NRP enjoys. It's right that it's not counted for benefits.

I guess it's because some fathers don't reliably pay the maintenance so UC don't count on it being paid.
And it's perhaps its too expensive and complicated to calculate it any other way - which is justification of only looking at one parents earnings for child benefit not both/family income or only looking a residential parents income for student maintenance loan.
The numbers of parents getting high child maintenance and UC might be relatively low so government thinks it's not cost effective to build in another level of bureaucracy.
But I do get that some people will definitely benefit from this, my friend also benefited like your sister.
But it isn't a race to the bottom, getting divorced is traumatic enough.
But yes some people will do better out of it than others and have the net income equivalent of a large salary.

Maybe he just doesn't want to look after the kids 50/50. Maybe his work involves being away lots. It's not necessarily all about money

It used to be paid direct to the DWP, through the Liable Relstives dept (1980’s). If the NRP didn’t send the money to them, the DWP chased the NRP up, and paid the shortfall to the RP.🙂

We need to go back to something like this system.

It didn't work which is why it stopped!

It needs to be taken monthly from the NRP wages, just like NI, student loans. That way, no one can lie about what they are earning, they can’t hide any bonuses etc.

It would cost an arm and a leg to implement though. and you’d probably see a lot more men push for 50/50 as they couldn’t get away with not paying or lying about their earnings.

And yes, I have seen men only want 50/50 as they wouldn’t have to give thier ex any money, and I’ve seen it only last a few months until they find it too hard or they get bored.

Look surely this isn't sustainable.

We have increasing numbers of old people
One in ten working age adults claim disability benefits
One in four children are entitled to free school meals (which means family income is so low that most money must be coming from benefits)
A huge amount of work seems to be in the black economy with little investigation of it happening
The country is massively in debt

It is no wonder that taxes are now so high.

Surely, surely we could as a country do better at getting NRP to actually pay for their own children?

There must be systems that could be put into place. Otherwise how will the UK function with so many people taking out of the system and so few paying in?

The issue is that there is no political will, from any party, to chase NRPs.

I worked for CMS briefly (twice - 8 months and 3) and at the end of my training I asked the lad training me when we found out about certain powers and when to transfer to that team/how to implement them. I knew about them as I had to push for them with my ex. The trainer had never heard of it. So nobody he’d ever trained had any idea those powers existed.

The constant attitude was about giving people more and more time. I got a proper telling off in my second stint (my point of quitting) for being “overly aggressive in pushing” because I said no more extensions to a man who’d been messing around for four YEARS. It was confirmed by my bosses that there was nothing wrong with my tone, or manner toward him. It was just felt that I shouldn’t have been so firm in saying no to another extension as he “sounded genuine”.

CMS has swathes of powers that are barely used. The reason for that is no political will to use them. The lack of political will to tackle the issue is shown so clearly in the decision, when the debt to the Sec of State was so high, when the need for something ti be done was “ah just let them keep whatever gets paid” when it was known that so much isn’t paid.

However, until society demands a change politicians will have no interest in one.

I sound like a broken down record, but until Steve is ditched by his mates for not paying, and until Mike can’t get a new girlfriend because they run as soon as they find out, and until Dave’s dad is openly disappointed in him for not paying nothing will change.

Politicians don’t care because it’s not a big deal societally.

Every NRP who doesn't want to pay becomes self employed. They manipulate the system via dividends/expenses/diversions/cash.

They find a way to lie. Meanwhile children suffer.

So did you notice all the women who were fucked over by it, then?
Why are you asking when I have already said I didn't agree to it? Neither systems are/were good.

I remember a debate with one of the mums. I asked what her plans were to prepare for the time her children turned adults. She didn't want to talk about it and accused me of being jealous.

She is now a shadow of who she was. With a man 15 years older, who from my perspective is abusive. He knows she is fully dependent on him. She won't leave because her lifestyle would be even worse. To make it even sadder, her kids have turned against her and become close to their SM.

I feel the system really didn't help her. All she could see at the time was how she was getting back at her ex enjoying a very nice lifestyle and she loved it.

Is one of the reasons why this country is heading towards bankruptcy. We are heading towards being a Greece, but look at them now after taking the EU medication which forced them to cut budgets especially welfare. They are gradually transforming

They should owe the money regardless of what they say. The payments should be based on what children need not on how much the NRP earns.

The NRP should have to apply for a benefit to cover their payments if they really need to. And any assets like businesses or household income should be taken into account in the usual way.

People are right about the 50/50 thing though. That needs addressing. It is not a sensible presumption. This new idea it is best for children needs to be sorted out. Also just because it is 50/50 doesn't mean costs are split evenly.

Because you said you totally agreed with the OP in the post you quoted. And your real life examples showed no awareness of all the women who were fucked over by it.

All that’s actually needed is a shift in society mindset which makes the politicians tell CMS to use their powers.

If CMS started regularly taking one off payments out of bank accounts without warning, or slapping charges on houses, then so many more men would pay up.

They have the powers. If they used them the situation would be much better. Especially now when they can get income details directly from HMRC if necessary.

But that needs people to want that change for everyone - including your brother whose ex apparently spends it all on nails and your mate whose ex shafted him in the divorce.

Well yeah. I guess that’s a way they could get round it.

Honestly, I will never understand such venom. My ex paid maintenance for 14 years (private agreement, the amount didn’t change in 14 years but his wages did, he regularly used to boast that he now earned 200k, 250k etc).

6 months in, be moved in and then married a woman 3 kids and gleefully told me that “under law” his maintenance would be reduced as he now had 3 children living with him.

He held that maintenance over me every month. I never went down official Chanels to get the correct amount as he would have just lied and to be honest, he made my life hard enough anyway. And when I met my now dh, he was of the view that me and ds were now his family, he’d take care of us all financially anyway (he still does, even though ds is in his 20s now, he’s still Dh priority). I couldn’t be arsed with the fight or ex h tantrums.

The last month he paid it, ex h sent me a message saying, “good luck. It’s your turn to support ds financially now, I’ve done enough.” He’s such a prick.

Yes, I know it’s impossible. But wouldn’t it be great, in an ideal world.

I’m not claiming it to be a revolutionary idea btw. I’m just joining in a discussion on a forum.