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My son who left school in may is 16 and registered at college but has never been and will not go so do I still have to pay his mum child maintenance???
Are you paying via CMS or do you pay directly? DO you know if the mother is still receiving child benefit?
I pay by standing order every week she is still receiving child benefit but she should have told them he isn't in full time education and won't go and it would have been stopped in September
Nevone,
The Child Maintenance Regulations state that your son should be in full time non advanced education for a minimum of 12 hours per week.
If he isn’t attending then he obviously doesn’t meet this requirement and is therefore no longer a “qualifying child” for the purposes of child maintenance.
The only caveat to this is that he may be eligible for an interruption in education for medical reasons for a period of up to 6 months.
If he isn’t attending then you need to advise the CMS. The date you report is important as this will be date you are no longer eligible for Maintenance. The CMS will use this date to work out what you owe up to that date. Everything you have over paid up to the date you report the change is gone unfortunately. You won’t get that back.
Important bit - if your ex says that your son is attending education then you have a fight on your hands I’m afraid. The CMS are biased in favour of the receiving payment and they will take your ex’s word for it (especially if child benefit is still in payment).
If you can then I would recommend you gather whatever evidence you can before you report this to the CMS. If your ex is crafty then she will block the college from speaking to you or delete your sons Facebook entries, etc once she knows you are trying to get payments stopped.
In summary, get what evidence you can ASAP and report the change to the CMS. Don’t allow them to tell you that you are liable to pay if child benefit is in payment- this is not true.
If they tell you this then recommend you also report the change in circumstances to the child benefit fraud helpline.
Good luck with it.
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