The current law only allows child maintenance to be taken from the paying parent’s sole bank account. This means that in a small number of cases, the recipient parent is losing out on child maintenance payments as the paying parent is avoiding payment by banking their income into a joint account.
The Government is planning to prevent paying parents from avoiding the payment of child maintenance, by allowing payments to be taken from joint accounts. This should help collect the outstanding child maintenance in this country that totals billions of pounds. Although there will be a mechanism in place to allow the joint account holders to stop payments being taken unfairly.
We will have to wait to see how the Government’s plans work in practice and if they result in disgruntled partners/spouses of the paying parent!
