Residence Orders and Impact on Money
With whom the child makes his or her main base impacts on housing benefits and child support.
If you are a single parent without the children living with you, you will get less priority for social housing than if you were the full time carer.
Just because you want somewhere nicer than the estate will not get you high on the list. Being joint residents will not help with housing priority either. The person with whom the children live will be able to claim Child Benefit possibly Child Tax Credits or Working Tax Credits.
This is all determined by the Local Authority or Jobcentre computers or HMRC and sharing does not happen. 51% or more of the care scoops 100% but if both parents put in claims for Child Benefit or Child Tax Credits in practice HMRC will suspend those claims for months so that is a weapon that can be kept in mind.
Financial hardship can put huge pressure on separated parents to claim incorrectly but be careful. HMRC and the Local Authorities are highly sophisticated when it comes to tracking down fraud and you can be prosecuted for serious criminal offences.
At Hylton-Potts we cover both Children cases and benefit and tax credit fraud but let us hope you do not need us for the latter two. A fixed fee applies from our London offices but we help people all over the country and in tax credit and benefit cases in Scotland but not Northern Ireland.
We would be interested in your comments, please leave them by clicking on the title to this blog above.
It’s such an unfair system. I want my kids to have a nice place to come to when they visit otherwise they will want to stay with their mum more of the time.
It does seem very unfair but if you need help having misclaimed, why not call us on 0207 381 8111 or email [email protected] to discuss how we can help you. Rodney
In this day and age of super efficient computer systems, it should not be too difficult for the social to pay what is fair to each parent.
The problem with this country is that is seems to encourage benefit scrounchers and young girls who get pregnant deliberately with different fathers to a string of baby’s, all so they can be housed in style, Sky-TV’s installed, all on the public purse. If life would not be made so easy for them, and they were forced to stay with Mum and Dad or in a one room flkat with five kids, this would soon stop.