Family based arrangements last longer

2001

DWP Research Report 152 - National survey of Child Support Agency clients.  Wikeley

Those NRPs who were currently married to a new partner were four times less likely to comply [with child maintenance]

October 2005

DWP Research Report 285 based on 78 non resident fathers with CSA cases. pdf

Voluntary support typically lasted for less than a year, only two told us that they had paid voluntarily for over two years.

16 May 2011

Oral evidence to Work and Pensions Committee. pdf

Nick Woodall:  The proposed reforms really build on the 2008 Act and the Henshaw Report of 2006, which identified very clearly that private arrangements tended to work better, tended to last longer and were more flexible.

Q8: Janet Allbeson:  You need a degree of amicability usually because a child maintenance arrangement has to last anything up to 15 or 16 years. There are always points when circumstances change—there might be another partner or other children—and those are the kind of tensions that can happen. You have to have a degree of flexibility to negotiate those things. We know from research though that voluntary arrangements do tend to fade away. They are associated with younger children, and when children start to grow up a bit it becomes equally likely that you will have no arrangement, or, if you have an arrangement, it is likely to be with the CSA. There seems to be a fade off a few years after the original private agreement was made.

Kids aren’t free, Nuffield Foundation, 2013

“Private arrangements appear to be difficult to sustain over time.Although four in ten (40 per cent) single parents on benefit had or had tried to have a private arrangement at some point, half had since moved to having a CSA arrangement or no arrangement at all.”

When I phoned CM Options in September 2017, I was told that family based arrangements last longer.  This is based on the script designed by Karen and Nick.  It is not impartial.  It is a lie.

NetMums, 2018

Sorting Out Separation (or Child Maintenance Options?) signposts to NetMums, where I found the only proper advice on child maintenance, from “Sarah” who works in Child Maintenance Options, and who answers queries in real time on the NetMums message board. However Sarah parrots the official line that family based arrangements “tend to last longer”.