Cork County Council to scrap child maintenance payments as income when calculating rent
Isobel Towse and her daughter, Wynn. Picture: Andy Gibson
Cork County Council is set to scrap the inclusion of child maintenance payments as income when it comes to calculating rent on local authority homes.
The move follows an impassioned plea from a councillor and single mother who pointed out that such payments, which may be intermittent even when under court order, should not be counted as income as they are specifically made for the welfare of a child.
Social Democrats councillor Isobel Towse said child maintenance is currently included as part of a single parents’ income when Cork County Council calculates rent due.
“I’m talking about child maintenance here, not maintenance that a spouse might receive, and not child benefit either which the State pays to every child in Ireland. This is about child maintenance, which is from one parent to another, solely for the child,” she said.
“When a family breaks down and one parent becomes the main care giver (in 86% of cases it's the mother), the other parent gives a financial contribution towards the costs involved with raising the child. The maximum a court would order this to be is €150 per week, but the average in Ireland is somewhere between €40 to €75 per week per child, and for a parent/ex-partner on very low incomes, they would be asked to pay even less than that, basically whatever they can afford.” Ms Towse added.
“So even if we take the higher of those averages, €75 per week, I can tell you as a single parent, that won’t get you very far. It doesn’t even cover two days of childcare.”
Ms Towse said council housing policy contradicts national social welfare policy as last year the Department of Social Protection updated its own policy and now disregards all child maintenance from the means test for all social welfare payments.
Ms Towse added that last year the government said the making or amending of rent payments assessment was solely a matter for local authorities.
Fine Gael councillor Sinead Sheppard said it is obvious the council can now deal with the issue itself and not seek government approval to delist it as income.
“Child maintenance is not a reliable financial support. There’s no guarantee anyway that from month to month that money will be paid, even if it is written on a court order,” Ms Towse said.
Michael Lynch, the council’s divisional manager, acknowledged the local authority’s rent assessment scheme includes child maintenance payments as income.
He said “there would appear to be some inequities in retaining maintenance payments as part of the calculation of weekly rent".
As a result of Ms Towse’s motion and the support she garnered from other councillors, Mr Lynch said the council will carry out a review of the rent assessment scheme.
It will be discussed in due course by councillors who sit on the Housing Special Purposes Committee, and they're expected to make a decision to remove child maintenance payments from a person’s income which will lead to a lowering of the rent they will have to pay for local authority housing.
