More discrimination against nonresident parents

Times Online January 05, 2007

Court order effect on child support

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,30589-2533023,00.html


Court of Appeal
Published January 5, 2007
In re B (a Child) (Child support: Reduction of contact)

The court was not obliged to have regard to the amount of child support one parent would have to pay the other when changing any access arrangements.

The Court of Appeal (Lord Justice Mummery and Lord Justice Wilson) so held in a reserved judgment on November 23, 2006, dismissing the father's appeal against the decision of Mr Recorder Maxwell, QC, in Chesterfield County Court on March 17, 2006, varying the court order relating to the father's contact with his daughter, by reducing the number of nights she was to stay with him from 105 a year to 93. That meant his liability to pay child support to the mother, previously assessed at £53.85 a week, was now assessed at £97.26 a week by the Child Support Agency.

LORD JUSTICE WILSON said that the father's liability to pay was assessed under the Child Support Act 1991 prior to amendments in the Child Support, Pensions and Social Security Act 2000. It was unclear whether he would be subject to the new statutory regime.

It would be impracticable for a court, hearing an issue as to contact or shared residence, to discern the beneficial or detrimental effect on the child of the consequences under the 1991 Act of alternative possible orders, demanding a complex inquiry into the likely differences under one or other of the regimes in the sums payable and also into the effect of the differences in those sums on the two households and on the child within each household.