Nothing simple about child support

The child support scheme is ‘Kafkaesque’ and in desperate need of simplification, a prominent family lawyer has warned.

Writing in NLJ this week, family law solicitor David Burrows says most parents are unrepresented, legal aid is rare and few lawyers deal with it, while ‘the majority of civil servants who operate the various branches of child support struggle with the meaning of swathes of the complex secondary legislation’.

Little, however, has been done to simplify the scheme. Another problem is that an individual parent has no legal right to sue for payment of arrears—only the Child Support Agency itself has the right to enforce arrears.

‘By any standards—especially of the single parents and children it is designed to help—the scheme’s success has been only very partial,’ says Burrows.

‘There are billions of pounds of child support maintenance in accumulated arrears, and no prospect of that being recovered.’