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What is Child Support?

When a couple seperate or divorce, and there are children in the marriage, the absent parent (the parent who doesn't live with the children) is required to pay a sum to the parent who looks after the children, every month. This is known as a support or maintainence payment.

How is Child Support Calculated?

Previously, the amount of child support to be paid was calculated by judges in the County Courts. However, they often underestimated the cost of bringing up a child, and only granted a portion of the absent parents disposable income. This meant that things such as debts and fees were taken into account so, for example, the money put aside by the absent parent for memberships of clubs, credit card payments et cetera were exempted.

This was deemed to be unfair and so the Child Support Agency was founded to administer child maintainence payments. The agency uses a complex formula, which cannot be accurately presented here, which takes into account the difference in incomes of the parents, the housing costs of the absent parent, and one half of the pension costs of the absent parent. Housing costs do not include utility bills.

Very often, the maintainence payments are now unfair to the absent parent, resulting in most of his income going towards maintainence payments, and so further reform has been proposed to the child support act in 2000.

The Reform

A simplified system will be introduced where the absent parent pays 15% of his net income to support a single child, 20%of his net income if he has 2 children, and 25% of his net income if he has 3 or more children. The maximum obligatory support payment will be 25% of the net income.