In January 2011, a Green Paper was published entitled ‘Strengthening families, promoting parental responsibility: the future of child maintenance’. Amongst the items discussed was a proposal to use income data directly from HMRC rather than the ‘non-resident parent’ when making the maintenance calculations.
In October 2011, we reported on the consultation to abolish the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (CMEC) and transfer its powers to the DWP. CMEC is a non-departmental public body responsible for the issue of Deductions from Earnings Orders. The DWP is the biggest public service department in the UK under Ministerial control, ultimately Iain Duncan Smith MP, Secretary of State. Note, however, that the consultation until 03 January 2012 is about the change itself from CMEC to DWP and not to any changes in the services that are currently provided.
Last week, Work and Pensions Minister Maria Miller MP announced proposals for a new statutory child maintenance scheme and produced draft Calculation Regulations to support the new scheme. They will replace four existing Regulations as follows:
- The Child Support (Maintenance Calculation and Special Cases) Regulations 2000
- The Child Support (Maintenance Calculation Procedure) Regulations 2000.
- The Child Support (Variations) Regulations 2000.
- The Social Security and Child Support (Decisions and Appeals) Regulations 1999
The Regulations are are clear that there is a dependency on HMRC’s systems providing the latest tax year income. It seems clear that the transfer of responsibilities from CMEC to DWP will happen – DWP will be using HMRC’s RTI data anyway when they calculate the new Universal Credit from 2013. It seems likely that the same RTI data will be used for the calculation of the new child maintenance payments.
Further Information
- Payroll Help 14 October 2011
- DWP – CMEC Consultation
- CMEC – ‘The Child Support Maintenance Calculation Regulations 2012 – a technical consultation’
- DWP – Government Consultation Response March 2012
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