[Solved] I'm not afraid of the big bad CSA

..this doesn't ring true! The CSA are not interested in her income/outgoings, only yours. The amount you pay has no bearing on anything other than your salary.

CSA is tied to child benefit and your ex will not be entitled to this when your daughter starts university, so the CSA payments would also stop.

Have you done a calculation with the CSA calculator to see if you are paying the right amount? It might be an idea to do some working out and show her that she may be worse off is she GPS through the CSA.

By the way the CSA has now become the CMS and there is now an admin charge for using their collect and pay service. This equates to 20% of the weekly/monthly amount paid on top for the paying parent and 4% taken from the receiving parents amount.

So on £400 a month you would have to pay £480 and she would receive £384.

Yes I used the calc, it's slightly complicated by the fact my son lives with me 3 nights but my daughter doesn't. I don't think she's making much sense but if it goes through the csa I don't see any need for collect and pay unless she wants to make me worse off out of badness. I've paid her since the day we split up.

I thought perhaps she was being awkward anyway and using an excuse to go through the CSA where one doesn't exist!

I think she's just plain crazy, after running out of things to battle about on our divorce she must be moving onto the CSA.

You can go onto direct pay which avoids the charges (there's an inital charge of £20, but I would think she'll have to pay that to open the case) - as long as you pay on time, you can stay on direct pay without charges.

The mortgage payments may well be a separate issue - if that's been decided in court as part of the divorce settlement, and not as part of the overall child maintenance package, then it may not count towards maintenance.

Thanks for that, I've always paid so I'm not too fussed. Fingers crossed it will all come back to haunt her.

Hello Trinity

I am William, the Child Maintenance Options consultant

First of all, as mentioned, the Child Support Agency (CSA) no longer deal with new applications, it is now the Child Maintenance Service, so any calculations you do now will be based on their rules.

You also mention that your daughter is going to start attending university. Maintenance payments should be paid until a child is 16 or until 20 if the child is in full-time, non-advanced education. Full-time is classed as a minimum of 12 hours per week and non-advanced is classed as anything up to and including A-level standard or equivalent. Once your daughter is attending university, it is likely that she will be studying at higher level than that, so you would not be liable to pay maintenance for her.

Some mortgage providers do ask for proof of maintenance payments and this does sometimes call for a statutory arrangement to be in place. I do not know if this is the same for private rental landlords.

This booklet, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/325219/how-we-work-out-child-maintenance.pdf, explains how maintenance is worked out including which expenses the Child Maintenance Service can be asked to consider. Their contact details are also included in this booklet if you would like to contact them directly for clarification on any point.

If there was a statutory case in place, you are correct in saying that you would not be expected to pay anything other than what you were instructed, such as school expenses, etc.

If you would like information on the options available to you to set up maintenance payments you can speak to Child Maintenance Options, the contact details as well as lots of information, can be found on the website http://www.cmoptions.org.

Regards

William