Cambridge Family Law Practice

A mother of two children has failed in a bid for more child support from her wealthy ex-husband who she divorced more than a decade ago.

The couple married in 2010, but the marriage lasted only two years before the wife applied for divorce. She is now 50 and works as a journalist, but she is also an accomplished academic, specialising in international relations. Meanwhile, the 47 year-old father is employed in private equity.

Their two children are now 12 and ten years of age, and both parents have since married new partners. The former spouses have engaged in a great deal of litigation in the years since their divorce. The wife made two separate applications to move to Pakistan with the children – both unsuccessful – and tried to claim a capitalisation of spousal maintenance from her ex (prior to her remarriage), despite cohabiting with a new partner at the time. Moving in with a new partner makes it very difficult to claim spousal maintenance from a former spouse in the English and Welsh family courts.

By the time the matter came before the family courts, the mother agreed that she did not have a substantive claim for spousal periodical payments, but instead sought an increase in child maintenance payments. In the High Court, Mr Justice Mostyn explained that:

“Her case…was that the existing child periodical payments were insufficient to meet their needs… and that she had accrued substantial debt.”

At that hearing, the presiding Judge favoured counter-proposals made by the husband. He would pay child support of £1,100 per child per month, and also cover their private school fees. He also ordered the wife to pay more than £66,000 to her former husband, representing half of his legal costs.

The mother applied for permission to appeal this ruling on three grounds, with an appeal to follow immediately if the first application was successful. Her team argued, in respect of the first ground, that the costs award was wrong and that the Judge had not properly followed the established Child Maintenance Service (CMS) formulae for calculating the amount of child maintenance to be paid by individuals earning salaries up to £650,000.

Mr Justice Mostyn was unimpressed by the arguments presented. He refused permission to appeal on the second and third grounds altogether (neither of which are relevant to this post). He allowed an appeal on first issue, but ultimately ruled against the mother.

In his ruling, the veteran judge carefully considered various precedent-setting child maintenance disputes and examined arguments that the CMS formula did not always make adequate provision for multiple children in a single family. Nevertheless, he noted:

“I continue to believe that the formula provides a useful and logical starting point in a child maintenance case…”

He concluded that the existing formula should be adjusted for incomes that fell between £156,001 and £650,000, to better align chargeable income with the level of shared care given to each child. This new approach would allow the convenience and clarity of a formula-based system to be maintained, the Judge declared.

Read the full ruling, which includes the adjusted formula, here.

Gail Marchant-Daisley, one of the partners here at Cambridge Family Law Practice, notes that “whilst the solution proposed by Mostyn J does go some way to avoiding the apparent unfairness that simply applying the Child Maintenance Service formula to higher earners can cause, the adjusted formula that he puts forward in this case will not be without its own pitfalls. That said, discretion remains with the Judge presiding over the relevant matter and the formulae are likely to be helpful at the very least.”