Stupid

There’s a quote that says: “ever underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups”. I’ve always thought of this in terms of politicians and mobs, but it also applies to large, bureaucratic, organisations, particularly Government ones.  They’re powerful – the benefits and tax systems in this country affect actual lives – and they’re run by absolute fucking idiots.   None more so than the Child Maintenance Service.

This blog has documented my turbulent love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with the CMS from its desperate beginnings in November 2018 when E suddenly ceased all payments (and they told him what to pay, but he refused to pay it), through my court proceedings in October 2019 (when, having taken over a year to extract a payment from E via a legal order, they then pressured me on a daily basis to let them stop that legal order because, E had called and told them he’d be a good boy and make payments now), through to May 2022 when, after doing what they asked and experiencing three years of inconsistent, non existent and late payments, I finally asked them to go back to collecting payments.  It’s been a fraught and frustrating relationship and one which, in the six years I’ve been dealing with them, has caused me almost comparable levels of anger, annoyance and pain to those caused by E’s actions in the same period.

Anyway, if (given the context of this blog), you’ll excuse the phrase the end of our affair was nigh.  On 31 August this year – when Youngest Son officially leaves full time education – I would no longer be eligible for child maintenance and my time with the CMS would come to an end.

There were just two months left.  Two more payments due.   Until then, I was hoping to squirrel away any remaining payments E made into a pot for the kids. There were, inevitably, arrears owed – E has never paid what he’s supposed to pay (he’s in arrears of around £1,500 despite the CMS wiping about £10,000 off his original arrears because he had another child, just two years ago), and I assumed that these would take another few months (or years) to collect, but for all intents and purposes, in two months, I would be free, not just of the CMS, but of E.  I was looking forward to it.

However, yet again, I completely underestimated the CMS’s almost infinite capacity to completely and utterly fuck something up.

On 10th June I received a letter from them – it said that they had been ‘told’ that Youngest Son had left full time education on 3 June.  When I called, the CMS seemed to think it was E that had told them – which would make sense given their propensity to immediately believe him despite all of the actual evidence they have of him being extremely unreliable, but I don’t know for sure.  

If it was E that told them it would mean that, rather than calling Youngest Son on his birthday, or sending him a card, E was instead calling the CMS to lie in order to get out of paying child maintenance, which, given his behaviour to date, makes a perverse kind of sense: one final act of wankery on his part – one last throw of the ‘I’m A Twat dice’ he keeps in his gambling kit – before never being able to affect us again.

Anyway, when the CMS were told that Youngest Son had left full time education – rather than checking with me (or his school) if this was actually true – they simply closed my case with immediate effect.  This meant I couldn’t even access my account to appeal their decision and send them evidence that Youngest Son was still in full time education

Their letter also said that, unless I asked them to, they wouldn’t collect the arrears E owed.  So they were just going to write off the £1,500 that they hadn’t collected (because no-one needs that sort of money, obvs).

Anyway, I have appealed and I’ve sent proof to the CMS that Youngest Son is still in full time education and confirmed in writing that I’d like the CMS to collect the arrears that E owes.  However – in stark contrast to how quickly they were able to close my case – it will now take them several weeks to ‘consider’ my appeal.  

I’m pretty sure that, whether the CMS accepts my appeal or not, I’ll never see another penny from E, and I’m fine with that, but, on principle, I’d like it logged – somewhere – that he owes that money.

The thing is, I’m ok.  I’m not vulnerable. I don’t need E’s money. That’s not to say I’m loaded (far from it), it’s just that with just a couple of months to go, I’d organised things so that any money we received from E was ‘extra’, it would be money for the kids, something to make their lives a bit nicer, but not essential.  But, there are really vulnerable people (mostly women) out there, who desperately need what child maintenance they can get and who depend on the CMS to help them get it.  Something like this could potentially ruin lives. 

If the CMS can just accept the word of an informant without confirming what they’ve been told with the person affected by this information, and without offering them the chance to prove the information is wrong before acting on it, it means the whole system is very easy to exploit by anyone who is reluctant to pay what they owe.  It’s actually mind blowing that they can close an account which provides vital financial help, without once checking with the person that this affects that the information they’ve received is correct or even warning them that this is what they’re going to do. 

So, it looks like my ties with the CMS, and with E, are being severed a little earlier than I thought.  Whilst I’m hopeful that the CMS will accept that they shouldn’t have closed the account in June, I’m not holding my breath and for my own sanity and peace of mind, I’ve had to accept that this is it.  It’s not fair that the final two payments will be missed, it’s not right that E owes £1,500 in arrears, but when was E ever fair, and when was anything he ever did right?    As for the CMS, there’s another quote often used by my Dad: “don’t expect owt from pigs but grunts” – they really are so terribly and predictably incompetent, that I was stupid to imagine that my relationship with them could ever end smoothly or amicably – this was inevitable from the start.

Ah well.  The good thing is that I’m free – of the CMS and of E – and I really am free now – the only remaining ‘power’ E had to impact on our lives was via the maintenance payments and that’s gone now.  My freedom has just started a little earlier than I thought and do you know what?  I love it.