A week in family law: attitudes towards marriage, child support closures and...
It’s Friday the 13th, unlucky for supporters of marriage, a Scottish local authority and others… NatCen, the independent social research organisation, has published new analysis of the British Social...
View ArticleChild Support Agency ‘has failed to collect £4 billion’
The soon-to-be-disbanded Child Support Agency has failed to collect as much as £4 billion in child maintenance, the single parent charity Gingerbread claims. In a new report entitled Missing...
View ArticleUsing the Child Maintenance Service and the courts
Let’s set the scene: You’re a family lawyer with a new client. There she is, a new mother, sitting before you exhausted from lack of sleep and looking nervous. Her neck is a blotchy red and she tells...
View ArticleWould deduction of child maintenance from joint accounts open a can of worms?
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has launched a consultation on plans to make deduction orders to recover child maintenance arrears from joint bank accounts held by a non-resident parent...
View ArticleChild maintenance system under scrutiny
One would have hoped that, 25 years since its inception, the child support/maintenance system would at last have evolved into something that worked smoothly and did not require constant monitoring....
View ArticleDelay in enforcing child support is breach of Article 6
The child support/maintenance system is sadly notorious for being inefficient. Whether its latest incarnation, under the auspices of the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) rather than the Child Support...
View ArticleJust how effective is the new child maintenance system?
On 3 August the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) published statistics for ‘effective family-based child maintenance arrangements’, for the year from April 2015 to March 2016. A few words of...
View ArticleEffective child maintenance, Cafcass figures and more
A week in family law The summer vacation is now in full swing, but the family law news continues… There has been a media outcry over the legal aid bill for Ellie Butler’s parents, Ben Butler and Jennie...
View ArticleShould a mother be forced to reveal their child’s biological father?
A news story broke over the weekend informing us that the German Justice Ministry has drafted legislation which will require mothers in certain paternity cases to reveal who they had slept with. The...
View ArticleChild Maintenance Service ‘endangers domestic abuse victims’
The Child Maintenance Service (CMS) puts survivors of domestic abuse at risk, two charities have claimed. Launched in 2012, the CMS was designed to replace the Child Support Agency. The idea is for...
View ArticleIs the new child maintenance system putting domestic violence survivors at risk?
I suspect that it is a common misconception that domestic abuse ends when a relationship ends. Well, it probably does in many cases, but in some cases it will continue for years after the end of the...
View ArticleCare demand, arbitration and more
A week in family law As the summer subsides, the family law news picks up… The Office for National Statistics has published its latest figures in relation to the formation and dissolution of civil...
View ArticleMillions owed to single parents in child maintenance
Single parents in the UK are owed millions of pounds in child maintenance, a new study suggests. Campaign charity Gingerbread claims that as much as £6 million is owed to such parents in West...
View ArticleInternal child abduction, child support and more
A week (or so) in family law I’m going to begin with a case that was actually decided last week, but I failed to mention here in my weekly review last Friday. I did, however, mention it here in this...
View ArticleThe reality of our failing child maintenance system
The Child Maintenance Service (CMS), like its predecessor the Child Support Agency (CSA), is a regular target for criticism. I myself have been a frequent critic – see, for example, here and here. It...
View ArticleMost voluntary childcare arrangements last more than a year
Almost two thirds of voluntary child support arrangements are still in place a year later, the government has announced. According to new research published by the Department for Work and Pensions, the...
View ArticlePressure on the courts, stellar contributions and more
A week in family law The Ministry of Justice has published statistics on activity in the family courts of England and Wales, for the period July to September 2016. These confirm the recent surge in...
View ArticleVulnerable witnesses, online divorce and more
A fortnight in family law Well, the last two weeks was supposed to be a quiet time, but it didn’t quite turn out that way… The first piece of news came just before Christmas, when The Guardian...
View ArticleHow much child support am I entitled to?
Or, to put it from the other side: how much will I have to pay? The first thing to say is that the parents can agree whatever child support arrangements they wish. This post is intended as a guide to...
View ArticleDWP boasts of 15,000 voluntary maintenance arrangements
More than 30,000 parents have now set up voluntary child maintenance arrangements, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has announced. So-called ‘family-based arrangements’ are voluntary...
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