2.4 Flaws in the formula for exactly equal sharing
of care
This is probably a rare case, and is not the key injustice described
in this letter. But it is particularly grotesque in its implications.
| "In the few cases where care is shared
equally, there are clearly questions about who is the parent with
care and who is the non-resident parent." [16] |
No, there cannot be such a question! The very terms with care
and non-resident by definition relate to the period of stay
with a parent, and here this is equal.
Clearly the White Paper's concern here is to be able to apply these labels
to the parents under all circumstances, however bizarre. The White Paper
gives a clue about why it tries to do this:
| "Child support will only be a requirement
if Income Support or income-based Jobseeker's Allowance is paid for
the children. In these circumstances, the taxpayer has a right to
expect that maintenance is paid, even if the parent who is not claiming
benefit for the children has equally shared care." [16] |
The White Paper's logic appears to be that if one of the parents is claiming
benefits, the other parent should help financially to relieve the cost
to the taxpayer. Quite right! But it doesn't actually implement
its own logic, and so fails in some circumstances to reduce benefits spending
where it could do so.
The way to reduce benefit spend is to identify if one is on means-tested
benefits and have the other parent pay an appropriate amount of
money to the one on means-tested benefits. There is no intention in the
White Paper to identify the one on means-tested benefits. Yet it is obviously
incredibly easy to do so.
The fair shared-care formula described earlier does precisely this. Because
in that case each parent is financially responsible while the absent parent,
but a parent on benefits who shares care has a zero assessment, then the
result is that an earning parent would pay half of the full assessment
at the equal-sharing point. (Irrespective of who gets the Child Benefit.
Child Benefit is irrelevant - what matters is who is claiming means-tested
benefits).
The derivation of the White Paper's approach is probably: "when
mother and father share care equally, the mother is expected to
receive Child Benefit and not work, while the father is expected to work
and pay money to the mother".
Why? What does this say about the contempt held by government
about the ability of mothers to care and work, and the contemptuous role
assigned by government towards caring fathers who must also supply more
than their share of money?
The White Paper attempts to justify this by quoting historical statistics:
| "As an alternative, it was suggested that
if care is shared, the parent with care's income should be taken into
account in establishing maintenance liability.... Table Two shows
that there is only a tiny number of current cases of equal shared
care where the parent with care has a substantial income." [18] |
There are a number of reasons why this is a bad argument:
| 1. |
Injustice isn't excused just because it only applies to a minority
of people. Those people are impacted 100%, not just a few %, by the
injustice. |
| 2. |
If there really are only a minority of people affected, then the
administrative cost of solving those cases will be small. The fair
shared-care formula doesn't cost any more to administer the majority
of cases, and very little more for that minority of cases. |
| 3. |
But, more important, the whole thrust of government policy is to
change those proportions. The government is in favour of shared care:
ministers say "children are entitled to the emotional and financial
support of both parents" - "emotional" as well. The
government has implemented New Deal for Lone Parents to help PWCs
become earners. So "two earning parents sharing care" is
the clearly the government's target for separated parents, and any
new scheme should focus on the results of this policy, not irrelevant
historical statistics. |
|