Tag Archives: financial

Amending the Register

I’ve been meaning to make a short post about registration of births since going through the process myself with our newborn. Today it is reported that the arrangements are going to change. For myself and the other half registration of his name as father on the certificate is automatic since we are married, but for unmarried parents this is not the case and whether or not the father appears on the certificate will be in the hands of the mother.

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Since 2003 the inclusion of a father’s name on the birth certificate is effective to grant him parental responsibility, and his absence will mean that he must either obtain the mother’s consent or apply to the court for parental responsibility. Often of course the main reason that a mother has failed to name the father on the birth certificate is precisely because she does not want him to play a part in the child’s life, including through parental responsibility and so more often than not the father will have to take the more litigious route. 

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The flip side of the coin is that inclusion on the birth certificate also triggers financial responsibilities to pay child support.

 

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However under the new proposals there will apparently be an element of compulsion applied to both parents: upon the mother to identify the father and for the father to sign the register. This is likely to have several ramifications as far as I can tell (assuming the requirements to identify and to sign are complied with):

  • the grant of parental responsibility will go hand in hand with the responsiility to maintain financially – either both will apply or neither.
  • mothers who wish to obtain child support will be unable (theoretically) to avoid the grant of PR by leaving the certificate blank. .

It is unclear how these requirements will be enforced. If a mother is determined not to identify the father or a father is determined not to sign – will the threat of a fine really make a difference? And according to The Times a sole registration will take place where obtaining the fathers details would be ‘impossible, impractical or unreasonable’ – including cases of genuinely unknown fathers or cases of abuse (does this mean in cases of children who were conceived by rape or is it more wide?). That is all well and good but doesn’t this provide a gaping loophole through which any mother who wants to can skip, and that renders the whole reform a waste of time? 

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I wonder how all this will work in practice? A birth certificate is a pre-requisite to an application for child benefit so whilst the registrar is messing about trying to locate the errant father so that she can finally issue a birth certificate – the child benefit payments are delayed. Of course all these things can be ironed out no doubt but this is just one of several ways in which this is a dumber and more complicated idea than it perhaps first appears.  

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And even if it is successful in its own terms – labelling parents as such and giving them theoretical responsibilities, what this law reform plainly will not change is the inability of the child support system to get blood out of a stone, or the difficulties in transforming the tage ‘parental responsibility’ into the ability to play a meaningful part in a child’s life in cases of implacable hostility. An ‘end to fatherless children’ as touted in The Times? I don’t think that’s very likely.

Mills McCartney Award Announced – and Judgment published in full

Well, we all knew there would be some kind of appeal – and apparently it is by way of Heather Mills McCartney appealing the decision to make the full judgment public, due to be heard tomorrow. In the meantime here is a link to the summary of the judgment published today.

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In short, Heather Mills McCartney was awarded £24.3m inclusive – far far less than asked for and quite substantially less than some pundits had suggested. Paul apparently has an asset base of £400m. The award was based primarily upon need. This may have been a case involving extraordinary wealth, and for most of us £24m is in itself an extraordinary amount of money, but this was never going to be a case where anything like an equal sharing of assets was imposed, not least because the majority of the wealth in question was presumably treated as non-matrimonial.

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NSPCC and Law Society Wade In

The NSPCC and the Law Society have recently aired their concerns by press release about the detrimental side-effects that the enormous hike in court fees for the issue of care proceedings is likely to have on child welfare. NSPCC director and chief executive, Dame Mary Marsh, says quite rightly:

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‘It is a matter of public interest to ensure that children are kept safe and have access to justice. There is a real and serious risk that vulnerable children and their families will be prevented from having full access to justice if these proposals are implemented because some decisions about taking proceedings in relation to vulnerable children could be finance led.’

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What is of course left unsaid is the sad fact that these decisions are – in some instances at least – already finance led. I would not go so far as to say that is is the norm., but I have handled several cases recently which should for the sake of the children have been care proceedings, but the court and the parties were left flailing without the support of social workers because the Local Authority was reluctant to issue and trigger more onerous duties to the family. The distinct impression one is left with in these cases is that the Local Authority prefers to avoid its more onerous duties to what might otherwise be accommodated children by persuading the more capable parent or a grandparent to seek residence orders, whilst at the same time attempting to maintain the view that the children have suffered or are likely to suffer significant harm (the threshold for initiating care proceedings). In at least one case I have dealt with this led pretty directly to the breakdown of a placement with extended family under a residence order because the Local Authority viewed the residence order as the end of the matter and failed to support the carer. In another it has led to the Local Authority failing to allocate a named social worker for sexually abused children even when the children’s Guardian was begging them to do so.

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Again, I think (hope) my experience is of isolated aberrations but it does highlight the potential for cash strapped local authorities and underresourced social work teams to make decisions about how they spread those resources between families on the basis of cost. I don’t know if certain Local Authorities have policies to push for private law orders (residence orders) where possible as a matter of course, but it does sometimes seem that way.

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