Am I right in thinking that for all new IS/IBJSA claims from April and all those existing claimants who transfer after April (sometime) onto the new 'adult only' system of IS/IBJSA that child maintenance cannot be included as income in the IS/IBJSA claim as its an income for the child/ren and not the adult??

If this is the case then the only means tested benefits to inculde Child Maintenance as an income (with a £15/week disrgard) will be HB & CTB??

Sorry if this has been covered elsewhere.

I just raised the same query with my manager.

Thinking of all those lone parents with (relatively) high maintenance payments who will now be entitled to the basic personal allowance of IS - but hadn't thought through to the knock on contradiction with HB/CTB.

I would like clarification on this too - anyone?

I'm not aware of any plans to disregard child maintenance as income for IS purposes, although I and many others have wondered about this. The key IS-amending regs (SI 2003 /455) make no mention of this. To my knowledge it was never part of the grand TCs scheme, because it would totally undermine the whole principle of Child Support, which was and always has been to reduce the IS bill for the government. Also, the policy is to maintain a very visible differential in the way IS works compared to the TCs, which must always look better and "more modern", whereas IS must remain as mean and unattractive as possible. The whole welfare-to-work plan is premised on this difference. And single parents are of course the main target of welfare-to-work.

In other words, children are excluded from the new IS calculation, but only up to a point! The reality is that child support is the parent's income not the child's. The new disregard of Child Benefit is different because it is entirely predictable in a given family, so the effect of its being disregarded can be absorbed (negated) by finetuning the child elements and family element in CTC - which is exactly what has happened.