Family Law

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has published its latest report on children benefiting from effective family-based child maintenance arrangements after contacting the Child Maintenance Options service.

Child maintenance is financial support between separated parents to help with the everyday costs of looking after children. If they agree, separated parents can privately arrange child maintenance themselves. This is called a ‘family based arrangement’. Child maintenance can also be arranged through the court system.

Effective family-based arrangements are set up by parents themselves and can be:

• Regular payments where at least some of the agreed amount is always/usually received on time and the surveyed parent thinks the arrangement is working very well or fairly well.
• Occasional financial payments or transactions in kind (e.g. school uniform) where the surveyed parent thinks the arrangement is working very well or fairly well.