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My ex-partner has just received a demand for £150 per week back dated to last November. He phoned to query it and was told he has to pay the full amount IMMEDIATELY and that it takes priority over his escalating credit card debts and mortgage.
Something HAS to be very wrong as all previous years he has had to pay nothing and the last financial year has been his lowest paid for ages. In fact he is at risk of losing his house as most weeks he earns nothing at all. He is 62 and, although he teaches adult ed classes they tend to be cancelled at the last minute due to insufficient student numbers. He has been getting by between art residencies at schools (only a few odd days work at a time, though with many more days of preparation) with an warehouse agency job - again the work is erratic and minimum wage at best. Incidentally, I only really found out the extent of my ex's financial situation when I admitted to him that I'd sneaked a look at his payslips which the CSA had mistakenly sent to me some months ago. Basically he is up s*it creek, in spite of having a very lowly lifestyle.
The child support agency has dug its heels in and I'm very worried, I can see them driving him to suicide if they carry on with this tack. He just has not got the money. £150 is more than he earns most weeks! I know this is a dreadful thing to contemplate, but he has had his Will drawn up and has made me the executor, with the estate to be split equally between his/my 11 year old son and his/his previous partner's 24 year old daughter. If he dies before paying the CSA will they take their cut from his children??
Personally I think the CSA has got its calculations drastically wrong. £15 a week would be more realistic, not £150.
As a matter of interest what would a person typically have to earn in order to have to pay the CSA £150 a week?
Has anyone else got caught up in a similar mess? What should my ex do? Any advice?
Thanks Louise,
Unfortunately my ex-partner is in a truly foul and argumentative mood at the moment and won't even listen to me. :o(
I gather that he IS appealing against the decision so we'll be in limbo until the dust settles.
Ironically I had my WFI this morning and did raise this new issue with my adviser, who agreed that a mistake does appear to have been made. He suggested that my maintenance was much more likely to be £1.50 per week which is a more typical figure.
Wall to wall stress, when does it all end?
Virtual hugs...
I've come to the conclusion it will never end.
reckon you are right! It has to be one of the circles of Hell!
I also have a new roof leak which the Council is not getting round to fixing. So my airing cupboard is now a power shower every time we have torrential rain. If the boiler is on it actually generates a fair bit of steam so I'm treating it as an impromptu sauna ;o) My son and his friends think it is amazing!
That's one way of looking at it!
If the children have a bath, water comes through the ceiling into the kitchen and runs through the light. The Housing Association don't seem to worry too much about it!!
The children stick to showers now (a plumber friend put it in for me, with permission, as a house warming present).
There was me thinking water and electricity were dangerous... :?
Hi harissa
Nice to virtually see you again! :)
I just wanted to say for you not to stress over your ex's finances too much, it is his bag and he has to deal with it. You have tried to offer him support and information that you have gleaned for him, but you can do no more.
Take care of you, how is your son doing?
Son is in the school's bad books alas! The silly season broke out at the end of SATs week when he and quite a few of the other kids decided that there was nothing left to learn as they'd done all the tests. He called a dinner lady "a pensioner" and thus got barred from the DVD film afternoon and put in internal detention instead. When he went on to lie on the floor and kick against the walls in frustration and boredom, the punishment was increased so that he would be banned from all this week's art lessons - they had a potter in to work with the kids. My son had been looking forward to that for months too!
So I've had a week of him crying and refusing to go into school ever since - pretty rubbish for a bright kid who used to love school. He has stayed at home rather than go into school where he would be made to sit in the library and miss out on the real lessons. Generally he just falls asleep there sobbing. Just 2 months left at that soul-destroying place thank goodness!
Re the roof leak, I phoned up the Council repairs for the 4th time today and discovered that they have no record of the previous 3 repair requests by me, nor of the one made by the boiler repair man. Out of spite their machine has now taken up sending automated appointment-reminder text messages to my house phone every hour on the hour. You just couldn't make this stuff up, could you!?
Back on the subject of the CSA issue, at least I now have clarification that it is not going to cause problems with my child tax credit situation and income support ... for now at least. Ironically my job centre man had assisted me in phoning the Inland Revenue direct and stating that there had been no changes in my circumstances. And then, I got home to find the CSA letter advising that my circumstances had changed by £3000+ in alleged back-dated maintenance. It could be very confusing keeping each department up to date with the ever-shifting situation and I don't need the hassle. Job centre man has advised me that at this stage I don't have to notify any of the other departments and to wait until after I get an actual maintenance payment.
From asking around I have learnt that a friend whose ex-husband is in a very well-paid and stable job only has to pay £25 per week per child (they have 2). Considering my ex had been asked to pay £115.93 per week and that he was on minimum wage in a warehouse for a few days per week, it is clear that a huge mistake has been made. The immediate effect has been on our son. His father is now too stressed out to see him and has cut off the pocket-money arrangement he had with him. Blooming great!
One useful piece of info is that if you receive child maintenance while you are on benefits, you are now allowed to keep £20 a week of it before it affects your benefits.
What I am unclear about is what would happen if the level of maintenance disqualifies you from income support. Does that mean you would also lose your housing benefit?
I'm not sure it would disqualify you from housing benefit, as that would be based on your income. It could possibly reduce it, but not necessarily stop it.
It's not even as if you can query it, as the departments won't do scenarios.
Hi harissa
You're right, you couldn't make it up :roll:
If maintenance payments were more than Income Support then you can elect to remain on IS and have the maintenance paid to IS rather than you....that way all you get is your usual IS and Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit. That means that IS get to keep the surplus maintenance. What I am not sure about is whether IS would send you the £20 disregard: I suspect not. There used to be a system whereby excess maintenance mounted up in a fund with your name on it and then when you did get back to work, you got all the excess. They stopped this though. :(
Re the man with the well-paid job paying £25 a week, that sounds rather skewed to me......
Louise
I suspect the man with the well-paid job was able to buy himself a creative accountant.
I suspect the man with the well-paid job was able to buy himself a creative accountant.
:lol: :lol: :lol:
My ex pays £13.71 a week, by telling the CSA he works 12 hours a week. He actually does about 30 - 40 hours overtime too, but has so far managed to avoid telling them. I did try :roll: on more than one ocassion (when he went to America to get married, and I had 11p a week while he was away), but nothing was done. I've even asked them to stop collecting it, as it infuriates me as I know he's lying to avoid paying for his children - but they've not done anything about that either! Just as well, really, as I seem to need it at the mo :lol: :lol: :lol:
I'm the first to admit though, that he can't do anything in my eyes now that's right... 8-) I do like smilies - have you noticed?!
Yes :D :D :D :D :D :D :D
The smilies are super!
I use them more when I'm bored :roll: or on revision avoidance. 8-)
It's been an absolutely gorgeous day here today.
Shame you can't use them to get extra exam points! Gorgeous day here too.
I thought you guys might be interested in what has happened since I started this thread.
Two Saturdays ago, my telephone caller display showed a "number out of area" was phoning me. I did not pick it up as these are ALWAYS (or so I thought) scam callers offering free holidays in exchange for my bank sort code - type thing. The caller left a cryptic message in a garbled call-centre Indian-accent explaining that it was a call for me about a "personal matter". Most puzzling.
The next time it rang I picked it up and made out the words "Mrs X, You are owed £5000 and we are going to take your husband to court to give it to you". !!!!! Eeek, what the hell was that about! I asked the woman who she was and she explained she was the CSA Dept Enforcement Agency. With my hearing problem, I had extreme difficulty in understanding what she was saying and wasn't convinced that she was authentic. I explained that I had a disability and that, as I would need a hearing person to be available to interpret for me, I was not in a position to answer all her questions that day. I said I would call her back a few days later after I had had the opportunity to seek legal advice. When she gave me a UK landline number, I finally realised she may be genuine and not a fraudster.
The choice I was given was this:
A - To say yes and give the CSA carte-blanche to take my son's father to court, seize his passport and driving licence and, if he was still unable to pay them, force him to sell his house or put him in prison!! (Really? Can they DO that?)
B - To say no thanks to the CSA and that I was going to make private arrangements for the collection of maintenance. This would release my ex from all his CSA debts and he would be a free man.
You can perhaps see why I thought the phone call was a wind-up!?
Immediately I wanted those morons out of my business and to stop threatening my son's father. What use is a suicidal penniless dad to an 11 year old boy?
I happen to know that my son's father owes absolutely no child maintenance as, although he had a minimum pay warehouse job for a while, he actually earned far less this year than he did on previous years. As he is self-employed (silly fool would be better off on the dole but is too proud and has a strong work-ethic) he has full records of his accounts which would have proved his case. BUT, in spite of him appealing that the CSA had miscalculated, they argued that he hadn't appealed. They'd probably lost his paperwork in the same way they had "accidentally" sent ME his personal records a few months back. What a bunch of @8$$!!
Also what is the point of removing someone's ability to earn money? My ex needs his car for the art residency work he occasionally gets at schools. The whole way the CSA mismanaged literally EVERYTHING has left me fuming!
The lone parent advisor at the job centre assures me that my opting to dismiss the CSA and have a private arrangement instead, will not have repercussions on my income support and child tax credit. I had feared that they would assume that I was getting £5000 from my ex and dock my benefit accordingly. This worried me a lot as that £5000 never existed nor ever will. Apparently I now only have to notify them if I do manage to secure a regular maintenance payment. Well, there is absolutely zero prospect of that!
A few days later I received not one but THREE letters from the CSA. Actually, one of those letters was only HALF a letter as they had omitted to enclose the 2nd page. It wasn't even a personalised letter but a tick-the-box printout from which I am left to assume that everything might be in order - I can't be entirely sure! The other 2 letters contradict the first and urge me to notify them within 2 days if my ex doesn't start paying me £502.36 a month from the middle of August!! I shall ignore them.
So, what is the point of the CSA? At the present time they seem to be pressuring people into agreeing to have their ex-partners destroyed or otherwise simply calling it a day. And this benefits the children how exactly?
Oh harissa what a dreadful story! yes they do have the power to seize assets and even to threaten imprisonment to non-payers. In my view, what has happened is that their "success" rate is so low that they are now pursuing people who may be seen as "soft targets", whereas anecdotally we hear plenty about parents who are less than transparent about their earnings and yet who seem to get away with it.
When I split up from my boys' father 11 years ago, we had an amicable financial arrangement. When I applied for Working Families Tax Credit as it was then, they pursued him and I had to write a very strong letter to them stating he DID not owe me any back maintenance and to leave us alone.
I am glad to hear that you have received assurances that it won't affect your Income Support. :)
Blimey Harissa that sounds crazy!
I think what is worse is as Louise says that the CSA is persuing the 'soft targets'.
Are you able to complain to the CSA? it sounds as if you wish to?
I do think this is interesting though for other people who are trying to pursue their ex's. Thanks for sharing it with us, let us know what happens next.
Hi harissa
A couple of things: firstly if a person had to pay a REGULAR child support amount of £150 then they would be earning £1000 a week if they were paying for one child! However, if the CSA ask for "back" money then it can be asked for at more than the set 15% amount. This does sound ridiculous what has happened to him, though.
I would suggest that his first step should be to check out his financial situation in general. People over 60 are entitled to a minimum income. The system is called Pension Credit. Earnings are deducted from the minimum amount but it does mean he would at least get £124 a week minimum. The best people to ask for advice about this and to help him work out what he is entitled to are Age Concern. Don't be put off by the name, they help anyone over 50. Phone them on 0800 009966. Once he has found out what he is entitled to then he can appeal to the CSA within 28 days. He will have been sent details of how to appeal with the letter or go to http://www.csa.gov.uk/en/case/maintenance-reviews-and-appeals.asp
I hope he can sort this out, this sort of stress is something more than any of us should have to cope with :roll:
Louise :)