When child maintenance stops, the worry is rarely just about the money
Last week the Court of Appeal handed down a judgment that matters to far more families than the one at the centre of it. The case involved a former Premier League footballer and sums most households will never see, but the question the court was asked is one we hear in the mediation room all the time: if the Child Maintenance Service changes what a parent has to pay, does everything agreed before that simply fall away?
The answer, firmly, was no. For any parent who has watched payments drop to nothing and quietly wondered whether years of unpaid support had been written off, that is reassuring. It is also a reminder of how long and how costly this road becomes when it runs through the courts rather than around them.
What the Court of Appeal decided
The case was brought by two mothers, each with a child fathered by Wes Morgan, the former Leicester City captain. Each was owed roughly £137,000. After he retired from football he told the Child Maintenance Service he was unemployed, and from September 2021 his assessment was reduced to nil. A tribunal later found that his income over the previous four years had in fact been somewhere between £220,000 and £240,000 a year. Before the nil assessment, he had agreed to court orders of £44,000 a year for one child and £36,000 for the other.
His argument was that every CMS review created a brand new calculation, so the nil assessment replaced what had gone before, and the child maintenance arrears went with it. Lady Justice King, sitting with Sir Stephen Cobb and Lady Justice Asplin, rejected that. There is one continuing calculation, she held, updated by each review rather than wiped out by it. Treating every reassessment as a fresh start would invite repeated litigation, expense and uncertainty. The arrears stand.
Why this matters even if your figures are smaller
Very few separating couples are arguing over six figure sums. The principle, though, belongs to everyone:
- A change in a CMS assessment does not cancel an earlier court order, and it does not erase what has already built up.
- Arrears do not quietly disappear because somebody’s circumstances changed.
- The CMS formula only reaches gross income of £3,000 a week. Above that, the family court can still make a top up order under section 8(6) of the Child Support Act 1991.
If your own maintenance was reduced or stopped and you assumed that was simply the end of it, this ruling is a good reason to look again at the paperwork you have.
The detail that should give every parent pause
Seven years. That is how long these families spent in litigation to reach a judgment that, in the end, confirmed what most people would have assumed all along. One family lawyer commenting on the ruling called it groundbreaking, and said that financial support should never become a “war of endurance”.
Think about what seven years means at home. A child who was four when this began is eleven now, most of the way through primary school and into secondary, with the whole of that stretch coloured by an argument between the adults. The money was eventually sorted. The years were not.
What the Child Maintenance Service can and cannot do
The CMS exists to be predictable and quick, and for a great many families it does that job well. Income goes in, a figure comes out, and nobody has to negotiate anything. When communication between two parents has broken down completely, that is genuinely valuable.
What a formula cannot do is look at your particular child. It has nothing to say about the school trip, the football boots, the braces, the phone contract, the driving lessons or the deposit on a student flat. It does not know that one of you kept the car, or that the childcare bill lands in August. Those are the things that separated parents actually fall out over, and they sit entirely outside the calculation.
Building an agreement that holds
In mediation, both parents put the real financial picture on the table voluntarily, with full disclosure, and work out together what is fair and affordable. That tends to produce an arrangement people stick to, because they built it rather than received it.
What makes an agreement last, though, is usually not the figure at all. It is the part most couples forget to include: what happens when the figure stops working. A well made arrangement says when the two of you will look at it again, normally once a year, what counts as a change big enough to bring that conversation forward, and how each of you will tell the other. Agree that while you are both sitting calmly in the same room, and a redundancy or a drop in income becomes a conversation. Leave it out, and the same drop becomes a dispute, and occasionally seven years of one.
If the payments have already stopped
- Keep a clear record of what was agreed, what was ordered, and what has actually been paid. It is far easier to gather now than in two years.
- Do not answer a money problem by changing the children’s time with their other parent. The two are separate, and mixing them makes both harder to resolve.
- Ask for the full picture before assuming bad faith. Incomes really do fall, and self employed income in particular can swing hard from one year to the next.
- Take advice from a solicitor on where you stand with any existing order, especially if arrears have built up.
- Consider mediation before court. It is faster, it costs a fraction as much, and you can see what that costs on our prices page.
The Court of Appeal has confirmed something important this month, and parents who are owed money should take real comfort from it. But a ruling arrived at after seven years is not a happy ending so much as a long way round. Most families do not need a landmark judgment. They need a clear, honest agreement with a sensible review built into it, reached while both of them can still talk to one another.
If maintenance has stopped, changed, or never really worked in the first place, we are always happy to talk it through. Our frequently asked questions cover how mediation works and what to expect, and there is no obligation in simply asking.
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