Help keep the CSA the way it is

February 24, 2011

It has taken over 8 months to start receiving payments from the childrens absent mother.

My ex did everything she could to avoid paying (ignoring phone calls, letters etc) so the CSA tapped into her wages at source.

Brilliant, but now the government are proposing to change the rules. They are now running a consulation process to change the CSA at our expense.

If you to had problems with your ex then you need to be concerned with the proposed changes because this is going to cost you money.

Here is a link to the consultation document:

http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/strengthening-families.pdf

The process will be completed on the 7th April 2011, so if you want to protect what you have then you need to say NO.

Half a million people complained about selling off the forset and the government did a u turn. I know you might not like this but we need to keep and improve what we have so we need to start making the government aware that we want the CSA left as it is (sorry).

Comments

  • hg says:

    i am all for change…if you were on the recieving end of the CSA you would agree…the system sucks…The NRP are screwed; and yes i have weekly contact but the ex disputes this and I end up paying twice!! I want it fair, the current system rewards the RP and encourages them to be greedy and deny contact ..the children suffer!!

  • Peter Anderson says:

    If you were on the receiving end of this monster that threatens, steals, to such an extent that hundreds of fathers have taken their own lives and in some cases their children’s lives as well. Yes, that how far the CSA pushes people. They take their homes off them, making families homeless, all for just a few thousand pounds, that will then cost the Councils and the Government many thousands of pounds in benefit to rehouse and provide for. Yes, families with children made homeless!

    There has to be radical reform. For example any child maintenance system must take the earnings of both parents into account, and being on benefit, including housing benefit and council tax benefit, must be treated as income. Similarly where there is shared residence, or split residence of the children, must be treated as such and hence no maintenance would be payable, as this gives the opportunity for both parents to work.

    But the key problem is the whole way the CSA works, viciously attacking fathers, with continual threats, taking money from their salaries, without proper authorisation or an application to Court, failing to discuss matters where people just cannot afford the amounts demanded, and finally taking thousands upon thousands of pounds from fathers and using that money for their own salaries and bonuses instead of ensuring that every penny goes to the children.

    Again, this is where the very introduction of the CSA was fundamentally flawed. They decided to overrule all the cases where there were already satisfactory agreements and Court Orders in place leaving the total mess that it is today.

    Go onto a site called CSA – If we have to pay, we want our say! on Facebook and have a chat with Lisa and Sarah. They both have similar situations and seem to be starting to make progress in getting the CSA to actually to do something.
    You can tell them I said for you to contact them.

  • Zoe Firth says:

    The problem with this situation, trying to look at it from both sides of the coin, is that the two issues of a) the financial cost of raising a child and b) parental rights and responsibilities of divorced/separated parents are – in the CSA’s own words to me last month – ‘nothing to do with each other’. This means that the circumstances surrounding the separation/divorce, any contact issues or absenteeism of either parent, any denial or doubt about parenthood, what a child wants and needs to lead a happy life, the child’s relationship with both parents before and after separation/divorce, and the present status and situation each parent is in at the time the claim is made (and at the time the non resident parent becomes aware of it which in our case is 10 years after)…are all irrelevant unacknowledged factors that the CSA cannot (will not, rather!) even take into consideration when working out who should be paying them and at what amount and by what means. This blatent disregard of all aspects of a family break up creates a dangerous unjustifiable loophole in the claims process that allows people to punish, bully, harrass, victimise, alienate, ruin and destroy another person’s life, continually doing so for the rest of their life, and not for the purpose of giving their child a more stable, financially secure lifestyle and future – they use the CSA as a weapon against their ex-partner because they bear grudges against them (as many do) – or because they seek revenge for their separation or incidents that led up to it, they are jealous of their ex’s new life since moving on from them and one wants to hurt the other out of spite and bitterness and old unresolved anger about the break up of their family. Then there are those who are so greedy for money but are too lazy or stupid to earn it for themselves, and these people see the CSA’s incompetence as another opportunity to ‘beat the system’ and as I see it, grasp a chance for them to fraudulently obtain money that they are not owed. Every day the CSA witnesses first hand hundreds of unfair cases like these and every day the CSA turns a blind eye and knowingly, GLADLY, helps people who they know are acting on sinister terms with vengeful motives for making their claims through the CSA. The CSA does not care a toss for morals, values and everything that a family is supposed to stand for. Neither does it give a toss about children living in squalid poverty who don’t have a voice as far as the CSA are concerned so they get pushed to one side, neglected and suffering from malnutrition because neither parent can give them food or love or anything they need because instead of focusing on the child, they become so embroiled in fighting each other through the CSA that they forget what they started fighting for in the first place. The child’s welfare does not feature in any of the CSA’s policies or procedures or publications….if you don’t believe me visit their website, have a look around and see what wonderful changes they have made to childrens’ lives and how committed they are to supporting families and single parents. Again in their own recent words to me last month when I complained outside a court room to a representative of the CSA’s parent organisation (the Child Maintenance Enforcement Commission) about the poor attitude of CSA staff when dealing with my partner and the disgusting way that he has been treat by them over alleged arrears which have accrued over the last 10 years that have only just been claimed in August 2010 for payments going all the way back to 2000 that did not exist until last year (so are not even arrears at all, but back pay!) I was told this ‘First and foremost we are here to collect money that you have not paid. We are a debt collection agency and we treat you – and speak to you – in the same manner that any debt collector or baliff would do when trying to collect in the money that you owe and have not paid’. You can’t read that statement and still honestly think that the CSA are a good well-run organisation who fairly recoup monies for the benefit of children whose parents are not together. If you find that statement acceptable, on any level, then you ARE one of the people using the CSA for deceptive purposes that bear no relation to feeding and clothing your child. I used to be a doorstep debt collector for various finance companies that give cash loans to people and collect the repayments every week – these people really did have a debt to repay that they were clear about and understood and could see the evidence for (such as the cash pound notes and my signature against every transaction logged in their repayment book). And the information I acted on was accurate, transparent, documented, checked and confirmed as being correct before I relied on it to try and collect a single payment from anyone. And even then I have never spoke to a single person who I have been pursuing about a payment in a derogatory manner, I have never intimidated or bullied anyone into making a payment, I have never needed to treat anyone that I have collected debt from like they were some sort of thief, liar, cheat and scumbag. I have never looked down my nose at anyone who owed money to the company I was working for at the time, I have never ignored their reasons for not being able to pay me nor have I ever tried to make anyone feel that their circumstances are their own fault and that their explanations are absurb nonsense or attempts to pull the wool over my eyes or wriggle out of paying off their debt. So I am not sure what she meant with that remark about ‘speaking to people like debt collectors do’ but I know this…a private company would not be allowed to operate like the CSA are doing…there would be a public outcry and the country would be in uproar about it – the offenders would be chased out of town by gangs of stick wielding vigilantes and Anne Robinson from Watchdog. The CSA are above all else – inefficient, unprofessional, inexperienced, mismanaged, lawless, disorderly, disorganised, unfit for purpose, reckless, ethically retarded, uneducated, inflexible, demoralized, unrealistic, power greedy, money spinning, out of control, deceptive, double dealing and a destructor of families, relationships and the lives of innocent men and women who are sometimes hounded to death or despair by an organisation which has taken on it’s own evil cartoon-baddie alike persona and really believes it can one day rule the world because nobody is powerful enough to stop it. Mwhahahahahahahar, and all that evil laughter going on in background. The good guys always win in the end though and defeat the crazy sneakthief much to his annoyance. That good guy will turn up one day and be strong enough to shatter the CSA’s disillusions of honour and grandeur, once and for all.

  • >