No parent should be forced to pay something that is unaffordable
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- Published: Tuesday, 28 November 2017 12:00
PRESS RELEASE
28th November 2017 - for immediate release
Universal Credit doesn’t take into account statutory Child Maintenance payments and is pushing non-resident parents into poverty
Families Need Fathers comments on today’s Heidi Allen 10 minute Rule Bill
Today Heidi Allen MP presented a 10 Minute Rule Motion - Child Maintenance (Assessment of Parents' Income). In presenting her bill she makes generalised and unsupported assertions that non-resident parents are registering as self-employed in order to avoid child support liabilities.
FNF does not support evasion of Child Maintenance but beyond Ms Allen’s anecdotal examples, believes not only that there is negligible evidence that self-employment is being used as a loophole for avoiding child support responsibilities but there is a major blindness to the impoverishment of many non-resident parents.
FNF Chair, Jerry Karlin, said today “in considering this Bill, MPs must take into account that there are almost 5m self-employed people, most of whom are on very low and irregular incomes and who may genuinely have insufficient funds to live above the poverty line once Child Maintenance has been assessed using the current inflexible CMS formula. These problems are exacerbated by the roll out of Universal Credit which does not take into account Child Maintenance payments. Universal Credit was specifically supposed to iron out such anomalies for people on low income and to make work pay.”
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