The liability to support children
I mentioned in my post here last Friday the plan of the Department for Work and Pensions (‘DWP’) for the Child Maintenance Service and Child Support Agency to share certain information about the...
View ArticleGovernment to offer free relationship counselling
The government has announced plans to give free relationship counselling to new parents in an attempt to reduce family breakdown. Under a Department for Work and Pensions scheme, health workers will be...
View ArticleNearly £3 billion in child maintenance classed as ‘uncollectable’
The government has classified £2.9 billon of £3.9 billion in child maintenance arrears as “uncollectable”, Radio 5 Live reports. The arrears relate to family cases handled by the soon-to-be-phased-out...
View Article70 per cent of children ‘live with both birth parents’
Seventy per cent of children now live with both their birth parents, the government has claimed. The figure, for the year to 2013, represents a rise of three per cent over the year to 2011. Of all...
View ArticleCharity calls for judges to push mediation
A legal charity has called for judges to direct more people towards mediation. In response to Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures which revealed the number of people who choose mediation to resolve...
View ArticleSeven out of eight CMS users are paying
Seven out of ten clients of CSA replacement the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) currently pay their liabilities, the government has announced. In a newly published set of provisional statistics...
View ArticleRelationship support scheme launched by DWP
A government initiative aimed at discouraging family breakdown has been launched by the Department for Work and Pensions. The pilot scheme will include a variety of relationship support initiatives...
View ArticleAre the child maintenance figures as good as they seem?
Last Thursday the Department for Work and Pensions (‘DWP’) published “Experimental statistics” relating to “Children Benefiting from an Effective Family-based Maintenance Arrangement Secured After...
View ArticleMore statistics, and more: a week in family law
Statistics once again feature prominently in this week’s family law news… First up, figures detailing the number of children benefiting from ‘effective family-based child maintenance arrangements’...
View ArticleChild Maintenance Service ‘neglecting arrears’ says Gingerbread
Child Support Agency successor organisation the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) has not taken the collection of arrears seriously, a charity has claimed. Responding to figures published by the...
View ArticleWill we ever have a child support system that works?
Last week the single parent charity Gingerbread expressed concern about the arrears of child support that have accumulated since the Child Maintenance Service began accepting all new child support...
View ArticleSeparating families struggle to find support
Families going through the trauma of divorce or separation struggle to find suitable support or assistance, Relate has claimed. In a new report the relationship charity claims that families breaking up...
View ArticleA personal view of the year in family law, part one
These ‘review of the year’ posts can easily get out of hand. The problem is not what stories to mention, but which ones to leave out. As a result, a summary of the year can turn into a multi-post saga,...
View ArticleAn update on the 2012 child maintenance scheme
Yesterday the Department for Work and Pensions (‘DWP’) published statistics for the Child Maintenance Service (‘CMS’) 2012 scheme (i.e. the current scheme), for the period August 2013 (essentially when...
View ArticleSmoke and mirrors from the government on child maintenance
“The aim of the CM reforms is to encourage and support more families to make their own collaborative arrangements and to deliver a more efficient and effective statutory service to those who really...
View ArticleChild Maintenance Service sees 21% increase in cases
The number of people who use the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) has increased by 21 per cent, official figures reveal. The CMS had 227,000 open cases in February, according to newly published data...
View ArticleA 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 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 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...
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