A barrister who failed to comply with an order to pay child maintenance was recently sentenced to six weeks in prison. The barrister had been ordered to pay £365 per month to the mother of their two children but had built up arrears of £43,000 with the Child Support Agency (CSA).
The living arrangements regarding the children were that they spent one week a month with their father plus every weekend with him. This allowed their mother (a taxi driver) to continue to work normally. The Child Support, Pensions and Social Security Act 2000 contains no mechanism for the custody of children to be shared. Instead, it creates the position whereby one parent is the ‘parent with care’ and one is the ‘non-resident parent’. In this case, the mother was the parent with care and the father was the non-resident parent.
The father argued that his child care costs were essentially the same as the mother’s and he refused on principle to pay the sum ordered. This in turn led to him receiving a suspended sentence, which led to the jail sentence when he still failed to comply.
The problem is, in essence, that there is minimal flexibility when it comes to the arrangements that the CSA can make. The calculation of the sum the father should pay was correct, according to the CSA rules, and there is no mechanism for addressing whether or not those rules should apply in a particular situation.
The upshot of the court’s ruling was that in order to enforce a decision which was intended to ensure the welfare of the children, the financial resources of both households were reduced and the children (who picketed the court to request that their father not be jailed) were deprived of their father’s company and care, albeit for what turned out to be only two weeks.
Although in some instances it is counter-productive as a remedy, the use of the blunt instrument of imprisonment is a threat which hangs over the heads of persistent non-payers of child support.
|
