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Whilst we're happy to receive any amount, we would suggest a donation of £5 as a baseline.
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The material on this website is published for information only and is presented in good faith. You are strongly advised to consult a solicitor or other qualified legal practitioner before acting upon any information on this site.
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- Are you a single father, bereaved husband or gay father?
- Are you going through a divorce or fighting for custody?
- Do you find it difficult being without your children?
- Would you like some advice from men who are, or have been through similar situations?
- Are you interested in supporting the rights of fathers, their families and partners?
Dads UK is a news and information site dedicated to giving a voice and support to all people interested in fathers' rights. This includes partners, grandparents, uncles, aunts and anyone who has some kind of involvement with the father. Dads UK supports the growing demands of fathers in today’s society.
Registered members of this site can contribute articles, submit news items and links to useful resources, as well as participate in our very active forums (separate registration required). Please join us today and help promote the rights of fathers and their families.
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Important note for users of our forums |
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Please note our forums require separate registration from the main site. If you are already a forum member, but not signed up for the main site, you will need to register for the main site.
We hope to be able to integrate the two systems in the near future.
Thank you  |
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Tuesday 02 February 2010 | The UK's Most active free Dads support forums | | | |
| If you are visiting the Dads UK website and thinking that some of the news items on the main page are a little old and think that this isn't a very active site, I want to convince you otherwise.
Dads UK mainly features as one of the best UK free resources for separated and divorced fathers.
The forum section is where it all happens.
We have 2,255 registered members and our members have made a total of 111,490 posts, assuring you the answers and support for some of the most challenging issues you may be facing.
We have a very mature forum structure which has evolved over the years based on members input and feedback. We also have a great team of moderators who dedicate time and effort to keep things running smooth, and protecting the identities of individuals who's situations dictate it.
We have a very down to earth no nonsense approach to information sharing and rather than skirt around sensitive issues, our members deal with them face on and tell it how it is warts and all.
For those only familiar with female dominated support groups this can be a refreshing change, some people initially find it daunting, but at the end of the day, we are all here to support members and give the best possible advice based on whatever information people are willing to share.
We also pride ourselves when we hear of good outcomes, and love to hear how information has been adopted and used to improve a families ongoing future situations.
We hope to see you on the forums, and to welcome you to our community, which has now proven to be one of the webs greatest assets to fathers, and their families during times of change and challenge.
When you join, please choose a cool handle, and be assured we will always endeavour to protect your privacy.
Regards, Baldrick (Moderator)
[Submitted by Baldrick] | |
| Relocation and Leave to Remove | | | |
| Relocation and Leave to Remove: A Report by The Custody Minefield
Foreword by Sir Bob Geldof. Published December 2009
I can hardly read the literature on Family Law without simultaneous feelings of an awful sadness and profound rage. Sadness at what has been done to our children and their families and deep rage for our Family Courts and the inadequate practitioners that work within it.
In the near future the Family Law under which we endure will be seen as barbaric, criminally damaging, abusive, neglectful, harmful to society, the family, the parents and the children in whose name it purports to act. It is beyond scrutiny or criticism and like a secret society its members – the judges, lawyers, social and child “care” agencies behave like any closed vested interest and protect each others’ backs.
The court is entirely informed by outdated social engineering models and contemporary attitudes rather than fact, precedent rather than common sense and modish unproven nostrums rather than present day realities. It is a disgraceful mess. A farrago of cod professionalism and faux concern largely predicated on nonsensical social guff, mumbo-jumbo and psycho-babble. Dangling at the other end of this are the lives of thousands of British children and their families.
Here is one more report that empirically nails the obvious fact that to remove a child from their father (in the hugely vast majority of cases), their grandparents and other family, their school and friends, is wholly destructive to a child and its family.
How much longer must we put up with the state sanctioned kidnap of our most vulnerable? Because in effect that’s what “Leave to Remove” amounts to. How much longer do we tolerate the vested interest intransigence of the appalling U.K. Family Justice system? How long before just one of them admit they have got it ALL wrong and apologise to their myriad victims?
This report is important, timely and vital. To accept its findings, which could have and should have, been conducted at any time in the past 30 years, is to accept the awful conclusion that rather than Solomon like resolving our tragically human disputes with understanding, compassion and logical pragmatism the courts have consistently acted against society’s interest through the application of prejudice, gender bias and awful impartial cruelty.
This report proves it. May God forgive them. I won’t.
Bob Geldof (December 2009)
If you support this campaign
please ask your MP to sign
Early Day Motion 373
We’ve made it easy, just click
on the image below. It will only
take 10 seconds of your time
http://www.savanah-jade.org/contact/email_your_mp.shtml
[Submitted by Bald Baz] | |
Friday 24 April 2009 | E-Petition to dispense with leave to remove applications | | | |
| This is an e-Petition on the Number 10 website which you may wish to sign.
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Dispense with Leave to Remove Applications as per many european states.
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Leave-to-Remove/
I would like the prime minister to consider the absolute damage leave to remove applications can cause to the child and the absent family unit. Case Law currently views the Mothers Unit of Greater Importance than that of the fathers, Is this positive discrimination? Leave to remove now is considered unacceptable in many countries, this application can cause emotional harm to children and there is a huge impact on the Father left behind. These applications should only be by consent, there should be no right to VETO through the Famnily Court.
[Submitted by Bald Baz] | |
Sunday 22 March 2009 | Government e-Petition: Openess of Family Courts / Relaxation of Section 97 of The Children Act / Permit the media to report on the processes | | | |
| This is this latest e-Petition on the Number 10 website which you may wish to sign.
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/UnveilProcesses/
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to show confidence and deliver further transparency to the workings of the servants (social services, CAFCASS and so called "experts") of the Family Court; to support the relaxation of Section 97 of The Children Act; and permit the media to report on the processes. The aim of the transparency would be to improve the public confidence in the Family Court Services; improve the processes of the court servants for the benefit of the children of the UK. The children of the UK deserve the higher standards that openness would in fact bring.
Baby P, Khyra Ishaq and Victoria Climbie had to be exceptional cases to break through the barrier of silence. No father or mother should have their child cruelly taken from them, be it by death or the bungling servants of the family law courts. --- The Prime Minister is reminded; Lord Justice Wall, considering S97 The Children Act, said in Clayton v Clayton:- "I do not think that, as a generality it is right to assume that identification of a child as having been involved in proceedings will involve harm to his or her interests or failure to respect the child's family or private life" --- But as of April, because of a change in legislation being introduced by Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary to squash the reporting the processes of the servants to the family law courts, of relatively humble cases such as 'Clayton v Clayton', the media will not be allowed to report on the processes. It will also be illegal for any children currently in care to speak out, even if they feel they are being maltreated. This petition asks the common people to unite against these pernicious secret systems.
Submitted by Dave Edwards – Deadline to sign up by: 20 March 2010
[Submitted by Bald Baz] | |
| What do you do when the mother of your Kids control everything | | | |
| My Ex-wife has spent years controlling my kids and giving the impression to the outside world that my Kids dont want to know me, as I have been absent thoughtless and uncaring etc etc.
I have been to court twice and every time I go Im told I am a great example to other fathers as Im well behaved and have caused no trouble but all this is to no effect because my kids are of a age that they know their own minds and are not emotionally effected, I am told politely get on with it and get over it !
I have masses of evidence to prove my theories with regard to being controlled.
I KNOW that my kids want to see me but are frightened of the fallout from their mother so they go for the quiet option.
WHAT ABOUT MY RIGHTS !
[Submitted by Varey] | |
| My response to Germaine Greer's article in the Times 5 June 2008 | | | |
| Germaine Greer’s view of a father's pain?
In yesterday’s Times, Germaine Greer wrote an article entitled ‘A dad’s role will never equal a mums’ aimed at convincing us that mothers should not be forced to name a child’s father on its birth certificate. Ms Greer espoused a knowledgeable view of a mother’s feelings for her child which she, I do not think, has ever personally experienced. She then continued to state, with confident authority, how much a father can feel in regard to his children when she is neither a man nor a father, and wrote: "Common sense tells us that a father's role is not equal to a mother'.s”
But why does Ms Greer consider a different role to be an unequal role?
It may be true, as she said that a man can become a father and not know he's done it, but only if a woman denies him that knowledge, and that does not alter the fact that he is a father. Furthermore it may also true that if a mother's "child is taken from her, she will experience pain at the site of the separation for the rest of her life," but Ms Greer infers, without any basis in fact, that a father does not feel the same pain at the loss of that child. No-one person can truly know the depth of feeling anyone else may experience in regard to the loss of their child, be they male or female, but discussion with men who have been denied the right to parent their child has highlighted that the pain they have experienced in their living bereavement at the loss of their child from their life is as deep and real as the pain I felt at the death of my own beautiful daughter.
For an academic to so confidently assert that this is not possible, without full research evidence to back this up, is in my view appalling and a further downgrading of the role of good fathers who love their children and wish to be there for them and to parent them, irrelevant of the status of their relationship with the child’s mother.
Ms Greer seems to have closed her mind to the possibility that the same biological programming that bonds mothers to children may also bond fathers, and appears to have ignored the fact that much of the research on maternal bonding took place over 60 years ago, in the post war era, when men came back from the war without jobs and so needed the jobs that women had taken over in our country’s hour of need. The best way to get women out of the work force and back into the home was to tell them that their children were suffering as a result of their separation from them. The same research was not carried out on paternal bonding but a myriad of current research now highlights the fact that children brought up with the influence of both of their parents in their lives are less likely to commit suicide, self harm, suffer from depression or other mental health problems. They are also at much less risk of taking drugs, behaving antisocially, committing crime, ending up in prison and of underachieving in school and leaving school with no qualifications.
It could therefore be argued, on a sound academic basis, that the best interests of the child are actually served by its being parented by both its mother and its father. Children need protecting as well as nurturing, and whilst the roles of the mother and father may in many cases differ it does not signify that the parents have a less equal role in their child’s life. I do not understand how Ms Greer can assert that a father's pain is any less than that of a mother's when the bonds are broken since the level of pain experienced is not absolute or measurable.
I find myself disturbed at the continual denigration of fathers and the feminist presumption, without valid supporting evidence, that children do not need fathers in their lives if mothers don’t want them there. Why should it concern me? I am after all a woman, a single parent, and a liberal feminist so I should be jumping for joy each time I read things like this, but I'm not; in fact what I am is very worried about our children and the state of our society.
Recently Mr Justice Coleridge stated that "We are experiencing a period of family meltdown whose effects will be as catastrophic as the meltdown of the ice caps," and that Judges are witnessing a “never-ending carnival” of human misery, and almost all of society’s social ills can be traced back to the collapse in family stability.
Our family law system is a shambles. Claiming to have the best interests of the child at its heart, in reality it has successfully aided resident parents with their own desires placed at the forefront, and greedy lawyers with huge amounts of money guiding their lack of principles at the rear, to legally destroy the lives of millions of children in our country, and leave them not only without one of their parents in their lives but also lacking half of their entire family and identity.
Men have little chance in the parenting stakes when Labour’s Deputy Leader and leading feminist politician, Harriet Harman, a Lawyer, and Minister for Equality and Women (an amalgamation which suggests that only women are discriminated against which, in regard to the Family Law system in Britain, is completely untrue) recently declared in an interview that marriage was 'irrelevant' to public policy and described high rates of separation as a 'positive development', as it reflected 'greater choice' for couples - Well what about the children in our country who rank as the unhappiest in a recent Unicef survey of 21 industrialised nations? Everyday the media reports evidence of a decaying society where children are confused, unhappy and sometimes out of control and where young people and adults alike fear for their lives as a result.
Now is the time to put our children first and to give them the right to be parented by both of their parents, not condemning the parents to live together in painful animosity which would clearly not be in the best interests of their child, but to force them to behave as grown ups who put their children first, not themselves and accept the duties and responsibilities that parenthood confers upon them.
A man should no more be allowed to abandon his child than a mother should be allowed to deny him the right to parent that child because she doesn’t want him in her life. Where allegations of abuse are made against one of the parents the case should be transferred into the jurisdiction of the criminal court to allow a full hearing of the facts, guilty persons must be punished to prevent the abuse of the child and by the same token false allegations must be result in perjury charges and be punished accordingly. The legislation will allow that where there is real cause, the fathers name need not be put on the birth certificate but that system must not allow women to abuse the system in order to keep a child from its father because she doesn’t want him in her life.
Those women who feel that the family law system benefits them now that may find that this will not always be the case as their sons and grandsons certainly will not benefit from the secretive practices of our family law system. They may be amongst those who, in the future, will have the horrors of this system turned against their family and if that is the case they may never see their grandchildren or great grandchildren again.
Unfair legislation has, as the past shows only to well, the capacity to turn on us all and those who fail to put the true long term best interests of the child before their own selfish desires are forcing upon them and society further pain and misery. I am sure Ms Greer would argue that the pain of the child and society is of little relevance when compared against a woman right to choose to keep a child’s father out of its life but just because she would like us to believe that she is right does not make it so and a wealth of research shows just how damaging her view is to children and to society and why a child must have the right to have its father not only named on its birth certificate but also in its life.
Tracey Wilkinson is a full-time mother of three, and sits on the executive of the Equal Parenting Alliance.
[Submitted by mirinanyasdad] | |
| CAFCASS NEEDS VIEWS ON COMPLAINTS SYSTEM | | | |
| Cafcass seeks your views on new complaints system
Cafcass today launches a public consultation on proposals to revise its complaints procedure. The proposed new procedure seeks to empower service users by providing more rights for complainants whose cases need stronger support and more protection for staff unfairly complained about.
Anthony Douglas, Cafcass Chief Executive says, “The Complaints Procedures are a significant part of the service that Cafcass provides to all of our service users and feedback that we receive during this consultation will play a key role in shaping and implementing our services. Understanding and improving the experience of people who use our services is absolutely vital. The Complaints Procedures has been designed to continue Cafcass’ commitment to openness and quality improvement. We welcome feedback and want to hear from all service users, whether they are children, young people, or adults."
Send your responses to: -email- by 15th August 2008
http://www.cafcass.gov.uk/news/2008/complaints_consultation.aspx
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Submitted by mirinanyasdad] | |
| Step 1 - Elimination of Fathers | | | |
| Father’s not involved? A Single Mother’s View.
The passing of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill this week raised quite a few concerns for me, not least the further downgrading of the role of the father in our families and society today.
Why should it concern me? I am after all a woman, a single parent, and if I were to really look at the description of terms, a liberal feminist, since I believe that men and women should be considered equal in terms of law and society. So I should be jumping for joy, but I’m not, in-fact what I am, is very worried about our children and the state of our society.
Recently Mr Justice Coleridge stated that "We are experiencing a period of family meltdown whose effects will be as catastrophic as the meltdown of the ice caps." And that Judges are witnessing a "never-ending carnival" of human misery, and almost all of society's social ills can be traced back to the collapse in family stability.
Our family law system is a shambles, claiming to have the ‘best interests of the child’ at its heart when in reality it has successfully aided resident parents with their own desires placed at the forefront, and greedy lawyers with huge amounts of money guiding their lack of principles, to legally destroy the lives of millions of children in our country, and leave them not only without one of their parents in their lives but also lacking half of their entire family and identity.
Undeniably some changes in family law were most definitely necessary. After all the traditional system long discriminated against women and gave them no rights to their person, property or children. The balance needed redressing, but no-one should be more equal than others under the law and that is just what our family law system delivers in reality and why the balance needs to be redressed again. It is necessary because our children are suffering and dying as a result of many of its shoddy secretive practices with a winner takes all ideology which causes harm to our children and certainly can not be deemed as being in the best interests of the child
A myriad of research now highlights the fact that children brought up without the influence of both of their parents in their lives are more likely to commit suicide or self harm and suffer from depression or other mental health problems. They are also at much greater risk of taking drugs, behaving antisocially, committing crime, ending up in prison and of underachieving in school and leaving school with no qualifications.
Added to this a new study by researchers at Rochester Medical Centre, New York, surveyed 1,619 children and found that Children who have been separated at any point from one of their parents scored significantly worse both on their ability to learn new tasks and their pre-literacy skills. The study, carried out by paediatricians in the U.S., held that children of divorced or separated parents are "at increased risk of learning difficulties".
This new research, and numerous pieces of old research studying thousands of children brought up in single parent households and those brought up by both a mother and a father, brings into question why our family courts so often use the ‘best interest of the child principle’ to reduce the number of parents in a child’s life to one when clearly being parented by two parents enhances their wellbeing and is ultimately much better for their long term welfare and best interests and society’s best interests too.
A recent report from Unicef placed the UK bottom of the league of 21 industrialised nations for child well-being and deemed our children to be the unhappiest in Europe, this raises further concerns as to the welfare of our children and we need only to look at our government and its policy on the family to see why.
As a previous Labour voter it distresses me to need to criticize a Labour government, but the evidence of a decaying society where children are confused, unhappy and sometimes out of control and where young people and adults alike fear for their lives as a result leads me to that criticism. It is time to stop the rot and to heal our children and families and thereby improve the lives of us all. Government policy on families will not do that, but then many politicians don’t want it to and so have embarked on a catastrophic crusade to demonise fathers and remove them not only from the lives of their children but from having a beneficial role in society too.
And it’s no wonder they pursue that policy at our peril, after all Harriet Harman, Labour Deputy Leader as well as Minister for Women, yesterday declared in a in interview that marriage was 'irrelevant' to public policy and described high rates of separation as a 'positive development', as it reflected 'greater choice' for couples - well what about the children? Further to this, in 1990 Harman co-authored a report with Patricia Hewitt and Anne Coote entitled "The Family Way" which criticised the family unit and mothers who stay at home and questioned whether men were an asset to families at all and whether "the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social harmony and cohesion”
Added to this attack on men as members of a family, we have Ms Harman and Margaret Hodge, ex Minister for Children and, according to her list of responsibilities on her UK Parliament biography, Human Right’s Champion, involved in the wrongful removal of hundreds of children from their families aided by the secretive processes of the family court system. Incidentally, as Labour Leader of Islington Council, Ms Hodge was also accused of being involved in the cover-up of child sex abuse allegations so I for one worried when Tony Blair put her in charge of even more children’s lives.
With such pedigrees from our Labour MP’s can we really feel certain that our government truly has the welfare of our children at its heart especially since the path has long been set towards the destruction of traditional family life?
That is just one of the questions I asked myself when I looked at the Human Embryo and Fertilisation Bill, a Bill which, in my view, clearly proposes to eliminate the need for a father. The Government does argue that research evidence shows that it is the quality of parenting that counts, rather than gender of the parents, unfortunately the study quoted as research for this Bill looked at only a small group of 70 children to support its view and even then the study only followed the children until they were two so showed no evidence on the long term outcomes for those children. They then totally ignored the evidence of numerous other pieces of research showing that the opposite was in fact true.
One facet of the Bill which enshrines in Law the fact that IVF can be used to create a child without the need for a father to be a part of the relationship may on the surface seem only fair to same sex couples who wish to parent a child, and I personally would not take issue with that, and indeed know many same sex couples who would make excellent parents should they have that opportunity, but my concerns centre on the fact that the next logical step in the process of the removal of the need for a father in IVF would be to remove the word ‘Father’ from birth certificates and then perhaps even ‘Mother’ and to replace them with terms such as “birthing parent” and “supporting parent”.
Similar moves are currently already being considered in Australia where a controversial new Bill is being debated that will in-fact remove the word ‘father’ from birth certificates. The Bill will basically give the lesbian partner of a woman who has a child after becoming pregnant by a fertilisation procedure, the legal position of a married woman's husband. The terms “birth mother" would replace "mother" and "both parents" would replace "the father and the mother" on birth certificates. Some MPs are apparently concerned that the role of fatherhood would be undermined by the bill and I would share that concern.
With the fact that the removal of the need for a father in IVF cases has now been enshrined in law, the term supporting parent, or something of its ilk will appear via the backdoor route of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill since the political correctness of the 21st century could not possibly discriminate against the minority of ‘supporting same sex partners’ by allowing the term father to remain on a birth certificate, it just wouldn’t be fair would it?
Well neither is the current family law system which allows a child to be denied the right to be parented by two parents. It could be argued, and probably will be, that the removal of the need for a father prior to conception from the IVF rules will aid the removal of the best interest of the child principle as being the standard in child custody and contact cases since, if a father is not necessary before birth why should it be necessary after separation?
As for the child and the damage that the loss of a father from their life does to them, well Ms Harman obviously doesn’t care about that, since she, and her feminist cronies and emasculated male colleagues want to put the rights of the woman far beyond the needs, rights and desires of the child with no consideration of the rights, duties or responsibility of both parents towards their children or society.
Strange thing for a woman to say perhaps, especially as I have already stated that I am a single parent, (and in my opinion I’m quite a good one), and I do not hold the view that people should remain in unhappy marriages just because society dictates it or they have no other choice, I have never even been married so it would be hypocritical of me to argue that way. However, I do hold the view that, unless there is a legally proven good reason why it should not be the case, a child should be parented by two parents, whether they live together or not, or get on or not. I know that is not always an easy course to take since I have done it myself without recourse to law, lawyers, residency or anything else of a legal ilk. Perhaps the fact that I was the child of divorced parents and experienced the unhappiness of that situation helped me to put my children’s needs ahead of my own in the shared parenting stakes, it certainly helped my resolve when the going got tough because I knew the alternative would be worse for my children.
I believe strongly that when we have children we have a duty to protect and care for them and a responsibility to them, and to society, in regard to their upbringing and welfare. I further believe that when allegations of abuse are made, be they sexual, emotional, physical or neglect, that they should be investigated fully in a criminal not family court, to ensure the safety of all, most especially our children, and to ensure that abhorrent false accusations are not rewarded with full custody and no contact but are instead punished as perjury, since they would then have to be made in open court.
I do not believe that one parent has the right to eliminate the other from a child’s life because they don’t want them in it and by the same token I do not believe that one parent should be allowed to disregard their duties and obligations to their child because they don’t want a part in the child’s life. It took two people to create that child and, if one person didn’t want a child they should have ensured they used contraception to prevent its conception, because those two people should both be responsible for the child and its parenting.
To you who do not feel this situation will have any bearing on your lives, especially the women amongst you, I say Beware! Maybe the family law system benefits you now but that may not always be the case. Your sons and grandsons certainly will not benefit from the secretive practices of our family law system and neither will their children. You may be one of those who in the future will have the horrors of this system turned against your family and if that is the case you may never see your grandchildren or great grandchildren again. Unfair legislation has, as the past shows only to well, the capacity to turn on us all.
And beyond this, well once the system has gotten rid of the fathers, there is only one parent left to go and then the state will have all our children to itself, (despite its appalling record on ‘looked after children’)
Beyond fantasy you might think?
Well, let’s face it the adoption targets managed to net quite a few lovely babies straight from maternity wards as well as pretty young children for the adoption market, before they were abolished after sustained outcries by prominent figures at some of the cases involved. And now we have some MPs backing ‘Stonewall’ proposals to have the words dad and MUM removed from early learning stage books, to be replaced by the term Carer because not all children have a mum and a dad! Sounds reasonable maybe, until you really think about it and then, given what is happening to fathers now, it should scare the hell out of you. It does me!
I do not want to see any downgrading of a father’s role in a child’s life and nor do I wish to see any downgrading of a mother’s role just to comply with political correctness gone mad. I certainly do care for my children, but I love them too and that far exceeds the role of a carer. Perhaps if the Feminazi members of our government dispensed with their nannies and spent more time with their own children instead of deriding those parents who want to be with their children as much as they possibly can be, they would understand why so many fathers fight to stay in their children’s lives after separation or divorce.
The balance in our Family Law System must be redressed now, not in favour of men or women, but in favour of the real long term best interests of the child who should have the right to be parented by both of their parents, and in doing this not only the welfare of the child but also that of the family and society as a whole would benefit. It’s time our politicians stopped allowing themselves to be ruled by fascist feminism at its worst and swapped political correctness for commonsense policies, then we will all benefit, not just the minority at the expense of reason and justice.
Tracey Wilkinson
Party Secretary
Equal Parenting Alliance
23 May 2008
www.equalparentingalliance.org
[Submitted by mirinanyasdad] | |
| Confidence and confidentiality: Improving transparency and privacy in family courts | | | |
| A new website has been set up to allow the public to share their thoughts on the Government proposals to open up the secretive Family Courts.
http://www.familycourtsforum.net/
The DCA have also launched a consultation document, and calling for feedback to be included in debating Family Court reforms.
http://www.dca.gov.uk/consult/courttransparencey1106/cp1106.htm
Consultation period:
11th July 2006 - 30th October 2006
We urge all visitors to Dads UK to take part in these discussions and consultations. Please join our forums to discuss these matters further, and find out how the Governments proposals would affect your case, and future Family Court cases.
[Submitted by Baldrick] | |
| Proportion of mothers who do not pay CSA is higher than Dads | | | |
| Seven out of 10 absent parents pay maintenance for children
· Image of fathers refusing to pay is exaggerated - CSA
· Proportion of mothers who do not pay is higher
David Hencke, Westminster correspondent
Monday April 10, 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329453996-103690,00.html
Guardian
The popular image of feckless fathers who leave the marital home and refuse to pay any money towards the upkeep of their former wife and children has been much exaggerated, according to new figures from the Child Support Agency.
Latest returns from the government agency show that a marginally higher proportion of women than men persistently refuse to pay child maintenance.
The CSA's figures show that in the three months to the end of last year some 30% of nonresident parents failed to pay. Of women, 31% were nonpayers, while 30% of men did not pay. The figures were released under the Freedom of Information Act.
Detailed figures released to the Guardian show that it is still predominantly men who leave the family home. But they show that previous figures claiming 70% of men refuse to pay anything are the reverse of the situation - 70% of all absent parents are paying some maintenance.
During the last three months of last year, the CSA sent warnings to 431,000 parents who had left home and needed reminding about payments. Some 413,000 were men and 18,000 were women. But only 124,000 men and 6,000 women refused to pay any money.
The Department for Work and Pensions said: "These figures are a running total showing where the agency's collection service has had to intervene to warn people they were in arrears. Previous figures suggesting that 70% of absent fathers [were nonpayers] were a misinterpretation which the agency has tried to correct."
The father who requested the information said yesterday: "When that 70% figure for nonresident parents not paying anything appeared I knew it couldn't possibly be true.
"You just had to think for a minute to realise it was absurd and it only sounded right to people with a deep personal need to believe it."
The CSA also released figures showing a steadily lengthening period for separated parents to get any money off a former partner. The agency took a mean of 150 days in 2003 to pay. In 2004 this had risen to 202 days and last year this reached 238 days.
The Freedom of Information Act request also reveals a remarkable lack of data held by the CSA about its clients. It does not hold information on how many nonresident parents are in arrears by the time they get their statements, does not know the average amount of arrears among parents who have left home or how many weeks they are in arrears. Nor does it know the number of nonresidents who were identified by its staff in the last five years - though it knows that 120,000 out of the 122,000 new cases last year involved cases where one parent had left the family home.
All this suggests Sir David Henshaw, the former chief executive of Liverpool council, who is heading a review of the CSA, will have a tough job sorting out the facts before he can recommend changes for the agency's future. He is expected to report by July.
The CSA has released its targets for March next year. These include a pledge to clear 55% of new maintenance payments within 12 weeks and 80% within 26 weeks.
[Submitted by Baldrick] | |
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Date published: Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:55:09 GMT
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Date published: Mon, 02 Jan 2006 11:00:00 GMT
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