Did you know Mumsnet was part of this?! Legal challenge to #FixTheCMS

[stumbledin]

Gingerbread has long campaigned for improvements to the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) to ensure that children’s right to financial support is upheld.

Child maintenance (sometimes referred to as ‘child support’) is vital for separated families and the well-being of children.

Academic research has found that in the UK, for children of single parents, who are both in poverty and not receiving maintenance, child maintenance payments actually being received would lift them out of poverty in around 60% of all cases. [1]

Children growing up in poverty is unacceptable, especially when government has the resources at its disposal to change it. This challenge will seek to ensure the CMS puts these resources to good use.

Children deserve better and urgent action is needed to #FixTheCMS.

Full story at www.gingerbread.org.uk/policy-campaigns/our-campaigns/fixthecms/

Isn't this what Jolyon Maugham was tweeting about, proud to work with Gingerbread and Mumsnet?

This is brilliant - what is Mumsnet's role?

What are they doing/have they done??

This is not an area of which tI have experience. Is the problem that the CMS are under-resourced And therefore haven’t got time to enforce payments, or that they are unwilling to use their enforcement powers, or is it that the powers themselves are ineffective?

Yes I remember their thread asking if they should get involved- pages & pages of women saying YES

@PaleBlueMoonlight

This is not an area of which tI have experience. Is the problem that the CMS are under-resourced And therefore haven’t got time to enforce payments, or that they are unwilling to use their enforcement powers, or is it that the powers themselves are ineffective?

A bit of all of it I think. Plus too many loopholes that mean NRPs can legally get out of paying

PaleBlueMoonlight

I think the problem is that this has been going on for so long, and so many families have suffered that if it cant be sorted under current set up then they need to do something different. In an ideal world the parent responsible for making the payments should just pay them. But they dont.

If you follow the link in the opening post there is quite a lot of info there.

.
“Contributing towards the food on your child's table and the roof over their head is surely the minimum basic standard for being a decent parent, which makes the low priority accorded to enforcing child maintenance payments close to inexplicable. As countless single parents on Mumsnet will attest, the effects on children's physical and emotional wellbeing are profound. It's long past time for the Child Maintenance Service to do its job.”
Justine Roberts, CEO and Founder, Mumsnet

Yeah, I read the link (well, skimmed it!) but I guess I am interested in the legal argument. Judicial Review means that the claimants are arguing that the process was not properly gone through, rather than the outcome was necessarily wrong. The lawyer in me is interested in what the legal argument is. However, you maybe write that this claim might be a way of trying to trigger root and branch reform.

*right