Child maintence paid out deducted from HB income figure?

My client pays maintenance for his child. His local authority have said that they will disregard the payments if they are paid under a formal agreement, so he now wants to formalise the arrangement.

CPAG and Advisernet both say that child maintenance paid out by someone is not disregarded from the income used in their HB calculation - there is no mention of formal or informal arrangements.

Has anyone ever heard of an LA disregarding child maintenance which is paid out by someone?

Housing Benefit or Council Tax Reduction?

As far as I know there’s no provision that allows a claimant’s income for HB to be reduced by deducting child support maintenance payments made the claimant. (I’m not aware of any local CTRS which would do that either but it’s a possibility.)

Could it be that LA have got the wrong end of the stick and are thinking about the disregard of child support maintenance payments received by the HB claimant? Although there’s no requirement for any formal agreement I know that LAs occasionally quote their own (procedural/evidential) tests as if they were part of the regs.

Another possibility could be that they’re thinking about the HB income disregards for some parental contributions made by claimants to students.

Thanks. It sounds like the LA misinformed him. Unfortunately, this seems to happen quite often.

If part of a private pension is paid to the ex spouse under a court order it would not count as the claimant’s income in the first place, so the question of disregarding it wouldn’t arise.

See R(IS)4/01 and CH/1672/2007.

Is that perhaps what the Council has in mind?

Or perhaps they are offering to award a DHP equal to the difference between what he gets now and what he would get if the income were disregarded, and they want to back this up with some proper paperwork?

No pensions involved. The client is only 22! The child actually lives with the client’s mother, and they have come to an informal arrangement for him to give money to his mother to help look after the child. The child-related benefits are already paid to the client’s mother.

In that case I can only imagine that they are considering a DHP