Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps his department is taking to ensure that members of the armed forces are not penalised in child maintenance claims where they are unable to meet contact night thresholds due to the obligations of active service.

The aim of shared care arrangements is to make an allowance for direct costs incurred by ‘non-resident parents’ when children are staying with them for part of the time. For shared care to be considered in child maintenance calculations, the paying parent must have the child or children stay overnight at the same address as them.

This requirement is set out in Regulation 46 of the Child Support Maintenance Calculation Regulations 2012, which provides that:

• A night counts where the non-resident parent has care of the qualifying child overnight and the child stays at the same address as that parent.
• The non-resident parent is regarded as having care when they are looking after the child.
• If, on a particular night, the child is a boarder at a boarding school or an in-patient in hospital, the person who would normally have care of the child for that night is treated as having care.

If a parent feels that a decision taken by the Child Maintenance Service is incorrect, they can ask it to look at the decision again. This is known as a mandatory reconsideration. This can include the CMS looking at variation decisions and decisions to refuse a variation. If a parent still feels that the decision taken is incorrect after they receive a mandatory reconsideration notice, they will be able to appeal to an independent tribunal.

DWP is fully committed to the Armed Forces Covenant and CMS engages regularly with defence stakeholders to make sure its policies, caseworker training, and communications reflect Service specific constraints.