Child Maintenance Appeal to Tribunal

[Eastenders2025]

Please can anyone provide any advice. My child's father works on a self employed basis for a building company. Due to him paying me a small amount of child maintenance I have opened a case with CMS. CMS have said he has not submitted a tax return since 2020 so only has to pay me £96 a month (joke)! I appealed the CMS decision (variation) where CMS investigated any benefits, additional income, dividends payments etc and their investigation came back unsuccessful. I appealed the CMS decision (mandatory reconsideration) which again came back unsuccessful. I am now appealing the CMS decision and taking to a Tribunal.

I have no evidence to support that my child's father works for a company full time, but I know he does. He drives the company van 100% of the time and I have security video footage of him driving the van whilst collecting and dropping my child back to me. I have some text messages with him cancelling or rescheduling seeing my child due to work.

I feel the CMS investigation was not thorough and they have not questioned where he gets his money from. I have provided CMS with the company's details and even provided photos of my child's father on the company Facebook and Instagram profile.

My child's father is a crook and I am pretty sure he has all his bases covered.

Any advice and support would be greatly appreciated for my statement / evidence to the Tribunal

Not declaring income is for HMRC to investigate not CMS. Not sure what your expecting a CMS tribunal to do if it's not their jurisdiction.

But HMRC won’t help with my child maintenance claim. I am hoping the tribunal will take it to HMRC as will have more impact rather than me

All feckless fathers are aware that to get out of paying child support, all they need to do is either go "self employed" or put themselves on benefits for a bit. Going self employed is the easiest option because usually they can't claim benefits forever.

We live in a patriarchal society that's set up for the men to do what they want.

No one will ask questions about how these arsehole men who claim to earn hardly any money are paying for their living costs, how they can afford a new car, how they can afford fancy holidays. No one cares that children are being deprived of financial support that would mean they have a better childhood.

It is down to the Financial Investigations Unit to investigate more complex cases like this.

CMS caseworkers can only forward a case to the FIU if there are “credible, evidence-based challenges to a child maintenance assessment”.

The FIU “does not accept referrals where the receiving parent challenges the income figure without any supporting information.”

This will have been your issue - By your own admission you have 'no evidence' of him working full time, or how much more he earns than what he declares. You're not expected to provide the kind of concrete evidence that would stand up in court (financial documents etc), but you would need to provide information that would make an investigation viable.

For example, information that the lifestyle he is living would not be remotely possible on the income he has declared, such as "He has declared an income of £25k, but drives a new Porche, rents a five-bed house and has two other children in private school...", or a declaration that you were yourself party to his financial misdeeds while you were together, "I helped him keep two sets of books for his business".

Unfortunately, simply saying that you 'know' he earns more than he is declaring isn't enough. A video on him in a company van is irrelevant. Rescheduling due to work is irrelevant.

Hey, I'm not sure if you're still on Mumsnet, but I've set up this petition to try and get the government to help in the case of situations like yours. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/751159 . I hope you're in a better situation now 💐

Start by contacting HMRC