A few days ago on BBC Radio WM (West Midlands) Ray Barry – leader of Real Fathers 4 Justice, Equal Parenting Alliance, and the J4MB candidate for Wolverhampton South-West at the 2015 general election – gave his customary excellent contribution to a radio discussion. The subject was some iniquitous anti-male rules being introduced by the Child Maintenance Service, the successor to the Child Support Agency. The discussion has just been uploaded to our YouTube channel, and you can access it here. Please leave any comments you may have there rather than here. Thank you.
For many years the CSA was recognised as being a bloated inefficient and ineffective organisation. In 2012 the CSA was replaced by the Child Maintenance Service (‘CMS’). The government is slimming down the organisation, and seeking to persuade ex-partners to negotiate financial arrangements independently. In its customary anti-male fashion, however, it’s just given a trump card to women.
Later this year, newly separated parents will have a choice to make. They can either make independent financial arrangements, or pay through CMS. If they take the latter option, they’ll be required to make a financial contribution to the CMS, all part of reducing the taxpayers’ contribution to the CMS. People will be given six months to decide which route they wish to take, and the first batch of letters has just gone out to the men and women involved. Over the next 3 years, people already paying under the old CSA scheme will have to make the same choice – make private arrangement between themselves, or pay through CMS.
So far, so good, but as we might expect with anything emanating from a publicly-run body, there’s a sting in the tail for men. If the non-paying parent (almost always a woman) decides to continue using the CMS services, that parent will pay a £20 registration fee (victims of domestic violence will be spared this charge), and 4% of the payments made by the paying parent will be taken by the CMS. A woman from Gingerbread protested about these costs on the TV news soon after this became public knowledge.
In stark contrast, nobody was on TV news protesting about what the paying parent (almost always a man) would be paying, namely an additional sum of 20% – FIVE times the sum paid by the non-paying parent – which would be taken by the CMS. This differential treatment of men and women clearly raises some issues, and Ray Barry explored them well in the time he had available, less than five minutes.
