Child Care Solicitors

You may be entitled to make a claim for child support or maintenance from the non-resident parent if you are raising one or more children on your own. This is a periodic payment arranged privately between the parents, and your local Child Support Agency (CSA) might collect and handle the payments on your behalf if you are not dealing directly with your partner anymore. The CSA can also trace and issue enforcement orders to absentee parents who are not contributing to the child’s upkeep.

If the child is living with another family member or with a guardian, the maintenance payments can be made to them. Whoever receives the maintenance, the payment is a periodic one essentially paid by the parent who does not live in the same residence to the one who does live there and is bringing up the child. It is paid where the couple separate and live apart, have divorced, or where they are not living together anyway but have had children. It is to provide financial support for the child and confirm responsibility for its welfare, and can reduce the need for other types of benefit in many cases.

One of a range of different rates is applied to the income of the absent parent when the CSA works out exactly how much child maintenance you are entitled to receive from your absent partner. The term ‘income’ as applied to your partner will take into account not only actual earnings but also personal pension and tax credits. Any money paid into a personal pension plan is deducted along with National Insurance and income tax, and whatever is left has a nil, reduced, flat or basic rate applied, and the result adjusted according to how many children are involved in the application for maintenance.

The maintenance payments calculated by the Child Support Agency are after they have assessed the living circumstances and the income of the parent who is non-resident. A basic net income is worked out as above, taking any deductions into account, and the resident parent bringing up the child or children will then receive 15 per cent of the final figure arrived at for an only child or a first child. If there are two children involved, this figure rises to 20 per cent of the non-resident parent’s net income and 25 per cent for three children involved. If there are other families involved then the same criteria will apply for each of them.

Where the child or children stay with the non-resident parent for at least one night of the week the maintenance payment being made to the resident parent is reduced accordingly. Such an arrangement is called shared care and under it, for every night of the week that the child spends with the non-resident parent, the amount of the payment is reduced by a seventh. The payment halves when each parent spends an equal amount of time looking after the child.

These and other issues can be discussed with Duncan Lewis, and other family and childcare solicitors, at any time.