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Keeping Children and Parents in Contact since 1974
Non Resident Fathers in Britain
Jonathan Bradshaw, Carol Stimson, Julie Williams and Christine Skinner
University of York Social Policy Research Unit, 1998
Contents
Introduction
Methods
Results
Becoming a Non Resident Father
Contact with Children
Child Support
Conclusions
Introduction
One of the consequences of the changes taking place in family form is an increase in non resident fatherhood. Non resident fathers emerge in one (or more) of three ways: a single man can have a sexual encounter with a woman which results in her becoming pregnant and carrying the baby to term; a married couple may separate after a child(ren) has been born to the marriage, or after the wife is pregnant; and a cohabiting couple may separate from each other, either following the birth of a child or pregnancy. Non marital births and relationship breakdowns are still on the increase. The latest estimate by Haskey (1998) is that the number of lone parent families reached 1.6 million in 1996 from 0.57 million in 1971. These lone parent families contain 2.8 million children. About 8 per cent of these lone parent families are headed by men. About 4 per cent of the lone mothers are widows. The rest all have non resident biological fathers of their children. However the prevalence of non resident fathers is much higher than the number of lone mother families. Most lone mothers repartner and are no longer lone mothers. But the fathers of their children remain non resident fathers as long as their children are children.
Despite their prevalence, despite the plethora of research that is now available on lone parent families, despite the hugely expanding literature on fathering and fatherhood (for a recent review see Burghes, Clarke and Cronin 1997) up to now very little is known about the circumstances of non resident fathers. Unlike lone mothers, they are not as a group particularly likely to be dependent on public services (at least as non resident fathers). Partly for that reason they are difficult to identify. There is no register of them - birth registration records provide details of fathers only for births to married couples and jointly registered births outside marriage. Thus very little basic information about the fertility history of men has ever been collected and there is practically no basic demographic information about non resident fathers.
Non resident fathers have been depicted in the past in a mainly negative way. Indeed, it was this firm anti 'absent' father ideology that was responsible to some extent for the way the Child Support Act 1991 was launched with extraordinarily little known about the circumstances of non resident fathers. In the US non resident fathers are known as "Deadbeat Dads", and in the UK they have been presented as feckless ne'er do wells passing on their responsibilities to the tax payer. Margaret Thatcher set the tone of child support policy-making in talking about fathers "walking away from marriage....neither maintains nor shows any interest in the child....No father should be able to escape his responsibility..." (George Thomas Society Lecture, 17 January 1990).
Yet non resident fathers have increasingly become the focus of policy concerns in the 1990s, particularly in relation to family law and child support. The objectives of this research were to contribute to knowledge about the circumstances of non resident fathers in Britain. We hoped as well to contribute to the understanding of the nature of fathering in modern Britain and to inform policy making on maintenance, conciliation and social security and thereby produce a companion baseline survey to that provided by Lone Parent Families in the UK (Bradshaw and Millar, 1991).
Methods
In this context this study sought to interview a representative sample of non resident fathers. Non resident mothers were excluded from consideration on the grounds that they are much less prevalent than fathers. Over 90 per cent of lone parents are women and about a quarter of lone fathers are in fact widowers (Haskey 1998). We also chose to exclude fathers who did not live with their children because they are away at boarding school or in care, residential home or hostel.
The sample was identified using a screening question in the omnibus surveys operated by two survey agencies - National Opinion Polls (NOP) and the Office of Populations Censuses and Surveys (OPCS). Included in these surveys (as it were between questions on voting behaviour and washing powder!) was:
"Are you the father of any child under 16 or under 18 and in full-time education who normally lives with their mother in another household?"
33,958 men aged 16-65 were screened between April 1995 and April 1996. 4.7 per cent acknowledged that they were the father of a dependent child living in another household and 45 per cent of these agreed to be interviewed. OPCS achieved interviews with almost all the non resident fathers they identified. However, unfortunately, NOP only achieved interviews with three- quarters of the fathers who had agreed to be interviewed. As the NOP omnibus is three times the size that of OPCS, this meant that we only achieved interviews with 38 per cent of the men who identified themselves as non resident fathers. We had originally envisaged a sample size of 1,000, and because of the response rate we extended the data collection period from the original six months - to ten months - and then a further four months. Even then we did not achieve our aim but nevertheless we achieved interviews with over 600 non resident fathers.
Prior to start of this research there had only been one other British source of information on non resident fathers. At the request of the Department of Social Security, Marsh (1993) undertook some secondary analysis of non resident parents in the 1991 sweep of the National Child Development Survey (the 1958 birth cohort) when they were 33 years old. He found nearly 6 per cent of parents and 8 per cent of men admitted to having a child living in another household. The sweep covered only 70 per cent of the original sample of 16,500 children and Marsh took the view that about a third of non resident fathers were missed by the survey thanks partly to bias in attrition.
Since this project began some useful additional sources of information on non resident fathers have been produced. Simpson, McCarthy and Walker (1995) have published their study of the experiences of 91 fathers who were in the process of divorce, having followed them for five years. Maclean and Eekelaar (1997) published their investigation into the views of 250 parents, identified using rather similar methods to those used in this study. Only 55 of their sample were non resident parents and only 49 of them were men. Clarke, Condy and Downing (1998) undertook an analysis of the British Household Panel Survey 1992 and found that 16 per cent of all fathers had children living in another household and they estimate that this is about six per cent of men in the sample. Finally McKay (1997), who has been using the Family and Working Lives Survey to trace family change, very kindly agreed to do some special analyses to provide information for this study. McKay found 268 cases, 5.6 per cent of the men aged 16 to 69 had non resident children. Also 2.8 per cent of women could be described as non resident mothers.
Our proportion of 4.9 per cent of men aged 16-65 who are non resident fathers is similar to the proportions found by Clarke et al (1998) and McKay (1997) but lower than that of Marsh (1993). It gives a total of just less than one million non resident fathers for Britain. This estimate is too low. Given the number of lone mothers, we estimate that there should be at least 2 million non resident fathers.
We always knew that this was going to be a difficult sample to obtain. There are undoubtably fathers who do not know they are fathers of a child, fathers who think they are the fathers of a child but who are not and mothers who think, wrongly, that a certain man is the father of their child when he is not.
Given these problems and the high level of non response, we have been at pains to investigate the representativeness of the sample obtained. It is only possible to speculate about the characteristics of those men who did not know or who failed to admit that they were non resident fathers. One can suggest that they were probably more likely to have been the fathers of children born outside marriage and cohabitation, where the relationship with the mother was fleeting or at least where there was no living together relationship. It is also possible that they were more likely to be men who would have had to be interviewed in the presence of new wives/partners/ relations and therefore did not feel able to be as frank as they might otherwise have been.
(Some insight into this is found in the experience of the Child Support Agency, 16 per cent of non resident fathers approached by the Child Support Agency disputed paternity and in 7 per cent of the cases, where DNA tests were carried out, they proved that the man who was alleged to be the father of the child could not have been the biological father. Coleman (1996) reports that a review of false patemity data for the US gives a range of 2.1 to 11.8 per cent but figures based on cystic fibrosis cases found only 1.4 per cent of false patemity cases for the UK. Clarke et al (1998) suggest from their analysis of the BHPS that the under reporting of male fertility runs between 10 and 15 per cent of births and up to 30-50 per cent of non marital births.)
A great deal more can be discovered about the characteristics of those men who identified themselves as non resident fathers but for whom a follow-up interview was not obtained, because they either refused or the survey agency failed to achieve one. All omnibus surveys collect standard data on the characteristics of their sample. The standard data collected by NOP and OPCS is not identical but with a modest amount of manipulation it was possible to combine the two data sets for most relevant variables.
There was no significant difference between the fathers who were interviewed and who were not in respect of the gender of the household head, current marital status, age finished full-time education, tenure, number of people in the household, children in the household, cars available in the household and gross income. However the sample who were interviewed were statistically less likely than those who were not to be single, unskilled manual, in employment and under 30. Thus, not surprisingly perhaps, non respondents tended to be young, unemployed, working class, single men.
These factors are likely to interact and therefore a logistic regression was undertaken of the odds of being interviewed to establish the nature of these interactions. In the best fitting model, after controlling for other characteristics, the sample who were interviewed was significantly different from those who were not only in respect of marital status and social class. The data was therefore weighted by these variables, using as weights the proportion in each family composition/social class cell for the whole sample identified as non resident fathers. This weighting procedure resulted in adjusting the characteristics of the respondents so that there was no longer any significant differences between respondents and non respondents.
There remains reason to be anxious about the representativeness of this sample. Weighting compensates for known response bias but it does not account for unknown response bias, nor for any bias in the sample of men who identified themselves as non resident fathers. As we have described, non resident fathers have been subject to a considerable degree of vilification in recent years. They have also been pursued for child support (albeit very incompetently) by a new government agency. There is also a good deal of sadness, anger and ambivalence among non resident fathers about their role and status. It is therefore not surprising that men approached out of the blue by a survey agency, even if they know, might decide to hide the fact that they are non resident fathers. This needs to be born in mind in considering the results in the rest of this chapter.
Results
The survey covered a range of topics, including the past partnerships and present circumstances of the fathers, contact with their children, child support, income, housing, employment, family relations as well as attitudes, beliefs, feelings and sense of well being. In this chapter we focus on some of the results pertaining to three topics: the processes and transitions involved in becoming a non resident father; contact between the father and the children living with their mother in another household; and child support.
Becoming a Non Resident Father
We found that 10 per cent of the fathers had never lived with the mother of their non resident child, 23 per cent had been cohabiting and 67 per cent had been married to the mother of their non resident child. But this classification of marital status is based on the most recent or only relationship which involved non resident children. In fact 61 (11 per cent) of the fathers had had more than one such relationship, 54 had had two and 4 had had three and 3 had had four - and this only counts those relationships producing children who were still dependent. Furthermore their fertility history was not yet over, in the sense that many were now or would be in new relationships which might involve the birth of children and which might founder. So the sample is really a truncated portion of the full lives of non resident fathers.
The relationship status of the non resident fathers at the time of their interview was 58 per cent single, 24 per cent were married and 18 per cent were cohabiting. However again this hides the real complexity of the status of the fathers. For example the large single group includes the previously single, the ex married (some of whom are now separated and some divorced) and the ex cohabiting. The largest single group were those who are divorced from a previous marriage (25 per cent). It is important to remember that between these points many of these men may have passed through other relationships a few of which involved the birth of a child which was now absent from the father's home.
As we have seen about ten per cent of the fathers were single and had never lived with the mother of their non resident child. Many of them were young when they first became a father, over a third (36 per cent) were under 20 and many of the mothers of the children were young - 52 per cent were under 20. The majority (74 per cent) of these single men had only one absent child. Of those with more than one child two thirds had had more than one past partnership involving the birth of a child.
Cohabitation breakdown is now the fastest growing source of new lone parent families and nearly a quarter of the ran were living in a cohabiting relationship with the mother before they became a non resident father. These fathers tended to be slightly older than the single, but 19 per cent were under 20 when they first became fathers and 34 per cent of their partners were under 20. The majority (68 per cent) of these men had only one absent child.
Ex married fathers were still the largest group of non resident fathers. They had the largest number of non resident children. The average age of the child at separation was 4 years and the average length of time that fathers had lived with the mother before the birth of the child was four years and two months - so on average these relationships had lasted over nine years. They had lived with the children for the longest period of time and, as we shall see, they are most likely still to be in contact with them. They tended to be older than the other two groups when they had their first child - only 11 per cent were under 20 and 23 per cent of their partners were under 20. However some of these marriages had been of fairly short duration - 16 per cent of the ex married fathers had lived with their wives for less than a year before the birth of the child and 17 per cent had separated within a year of the birth of the child.
Those fathers who had ever had a living together relationship with the mother of their non resident child were asked about the circumstances that led to the decision to separate. For the married it was most commonly the mother who made the decision to separate (42 per cent). In only a third of the cases was it the father and in the rest (26 per cent) it was both. For the ex cohabiting more fathers than mothers made the decision (35 per cent against 26 per cent) and it was also more likely than in the case of the married to be a joint decision to separate (39 per cent).
The fathers who had lived together were also asked to give the reasons why they had decided to separate. Obviously the reasons why relationships end are complex, vary over time, interact and are difficult to summarise in response to a structured questionnaire. The most common reason given by the fathers was that their partner found someone else/committed adultery/was unfaithful. This was the only reason given by a quarter of the sample and mentioned as one reason by a third of the fathers. Another very common reason mentioned was that the couples had been rowing a lot, followed by lack of communication/did not talk. Money problems were mentioned in 16 per cent of cases. Adultery of the father was only admitted as a reason in a 11 per cent of cases. It is striking that violence was mentioned as a reason in only 2 per cent. Lone parents in the Bradshaw and Millar (1991) study mentioned violence as a reason for the breakup in 20 per cent of cases and as the main reason for the breakup in 13 per cent of cases. Clearly there may have been a reluctance on behalf of these fathers to acknowledge or admit violent behaviour.
The fathers were asked about their present feelings about the breakup of their relationship using a similar question to one employed by Bradshaw and Millar (1991). Very few fathers regretted the breakup of their relationship. Only 5 per cent wished that they had stayed with their partner and 6 per cent wished that their partner had stayed with them, whereas 56 per cent were glad that they had not stayed with their partner and 9 per cent that their partner had not stayed with them. Compared to the lone mothers in the Bradshaw and Millar study more of the divorced and fewer of the separated wished they had stayed together but the main difference was that a much higher proportion of these fathers than lone mothers said that they had no say in the breakup of their relationship. This suggests that these fathers had no input into the decision to end the relationship and therefore non residential fatherhood may have been thrust upon them. This probably has implications for their attitudes to contact and child support issues.
Contact with Children
One of the most important issues to be investigated in this study was the extent and quality of the contact between the non resident fathers and their children. A major grievance of fathers in this study, certainly more important than concerns over child support, was the difficulties that they had seeing their children. Nevertheless contact with their non resident children was rather higher than expected. Only 21 per cent of our sample had not seen their children in the last year and 47 per cent saw their child at least every week.
This is a much higher rate of contact than that derived from studies of lone parents. For example Bradshaw and Millar (1991) found that lone mothers said that only 25 per cent of non resident fathers had contact at least once per week and that 47 per cent had had no contact with their child for over a year. They found that forty per cent of the fathers of the children had lost contact within two years of separation or child birth. These findings have been much quoted in discussions about the consequences of family breakdown. The findings of our study that only 3 per cent had no contact at all suggests that there might be something very wrong with the reliability of the results in this study or Bradshaw and Millar's or both. We therefore need to start by attempting to reconcile these findings.
First it is important to remember that the samples are not matched. Bradshaw and Millar's study contained both lone mothers and lone fathers and lone mothers reported lower rates of child contact with their past partners than lone fathers did. Further the former partners of non resident fathers are not necessarily lone mothers - thus the sample of fathers is not matched by a sample of lone mothers. In this study 86 per cent of the fathers knew the present circumstances of their former partner and in 57 per cent of these the former partner had repartnered and were no longer lone mothers. So we would expect to find some differences in the contact rates reported by fathers in this study and the lone mothers in the Bradshaw and Millar study.
Second and more profoundly the emphasis on seeing the child in the questions about contact used in these surveys may be, with hindsight, too imprecise a definition of contact, failing to pick up the essence of a relationship between the fathers and their children. Seeing did not perhaps pick up on alternative ways of maintaining fairly close and perhaps valued relationships between the fathers and their children including regular phoning, correspondence and even e-mail.
Nevertheless in an attempt to reconcile the differences between the two surveys we decided to reanalyse the Bradshaw and Millar survey in order to produce estimates of contact just for the fathers of the children of lone mothers and to match it to the classification of contact used in this present study. Even after controlling for marital status and length of lone parenthood/non resident fathering, there is still a fairly substantial difference between the surveys. For example comparing the ex married who have been separated for at least three years in each sample we find that 60 per cent have not seen their father in the last month in Bradshaw and Millar compared to 33 per cent in this present study.
There are three possible explanations for the differences observed. First the fact that they are not matched samples. Then, there is the possibility that either this sample was biased in favour of men with contact - those without contact could well have been men reluctant to acknowledge that they were the father of a child in another household at the screening survey. Third perhaps lone mothers and non resident fathers perceive and report contact differently - lone mothers may not welcome and be reluctant to acknowledge the continuing involvement of a non resident father. Or they may feel that the nature of that contact is too trivial to recognise. In contrast the fathers may want to assert their parental role and perhaps claim greater involvement than in reality they have.
Fathers living alone are 2.82 times more likely to have regular contact than a father living in a household with children; fathers who have (re)married are two thirds less likely to see children regularly. In addition older fathers, employed fathers, fathers with higher incomes, fathers with younger children, fathers who have lived together with the child, fathers who have recently separated, fathers who live close to the child are all much more likely to have regular contact with their absent child.
However a number of these factors interact. For example, the chances of a father who lives more than two hours travelling time away from his child having regular contact is 94 per cent less than if he lives only 10 minutes away.
Relationship with the mother
We also found that the father's relationship with the mother was a critical determinant of contact - fathers who had an amicable relationship with the mother were much more likely to have regular contact with their child than those whose relationship with the mother was hostile. About half (47 per cent) of those with contact described their relationship with their former partner as amicable and another quarter as amicable but distant. In contrast only 14 per cent of the fathers who did not have regular contact with their child described their relationship with the mother as amicable and 9 per cent as amicable but distant. We also found that fathers who are now living in households with children have less amicable relations with their former partner than those who live alone or with a new partner without children. It appears from this that new children and new step children may be associated with poorer relationships with former partners and perhaps be competing for time and attention with the non resident children.
Child Support
Policy background
The issue of child support has become probably the most salient policy affecting non resident parents since Margaret Thatcher declared:
"No father should be able to escape his responsibility and that is why the Government is looking for ways of strengthening the system for tracing an absent father and making arrangements for recovering maintenance more effective" (Text of the National Children's Homes' George Thomas Society lecture, 17 January, 1990).
Child support had until then been a neglected policy issue. Existing maintenance rewards through the courts were low, irregularly paid and often not reviewed over time. The 'liable relative' procedures had also become a relatively neglected part of the work of the Department of Social Security. The new interest arose partly as a result of the sharp increase in the numbers of lone parents and their increased dependence on Income Support - the aim was to reduce benefit expenditure and encourage more lone parents into employment. But there was also a fundamentally moral view being reasserted - that biological parents should be responsible for their children throughout their lives. Indeed in the second reading on the Child Support Bill the hope was expressed by some MPs on the government benches that enforcing the obligation to pay child support might persuade fathers to maintain their marital and patemal duties and be less inclined to conceive children outside marriage.
This is not the place to review the debacle of child support since the Child Support Agency began operations in April 1993, but it must rank as one of the worst social policy making disasters in modem history - certainly on a par with the Poll Tax. It is widely agreed that the Act contained some fundamental flaws - including its retrospective nature, the absence of a disregard for those on Income Support, the formula was too complicated to understand but at the same time there was no scope for taking account of exceptional circumstances or special needs. The Bill was poorly scrutinised by Parliament - there was general support for the principle of the Act and not enough attention paid to the detail. The implementation of the Act by the Child Support Agency was a fiasco, with inadequate computer systems, poor management and ill prepared staff. The result was huge delays and backlogs, inaccurate assessments, incompetent or non existent enforcement, which has resulted in confusion, misery (including some suicides) and a general loss of confidence in the Agency by both lone parents and nor resident fathers. After five years of operation, an amending Act, endless changes in regulations, the departure of two Chief Executives, six parliamentary select committee inquiries and repeated critical reports from the National Audit Office, the child support system is failing to deliver on all its objectives. Non compliance and collusion are though to be epidemic and arrears amount to over UK2 billion. Instead of the single child support regime envisaged, we have a dual system re-established, one for lone parents on means tested benefits and other arrangements through lawyers and the courts for other people. The proportion of lone parents receiving regular child support is very little different from what it was under the old system and the level of payments, which have fallen due to changes in the original formula are also not much greater (taking into account inflation since 1989).
It is arguable that, if account is taken of the costs of administering the CSA, then the savings to the public purse have been minuscule or non existent, compared to the old system.
At the time of writing the Labour Government is in the process of reviewing the Child Support Act. There is a strong body of political opinion including the Liberal Party in support of abandoning the Act and returning to a court based or at least judicial system that allows more flexible, individualised justice than the formula driven scheme.
The findings of this study
The research for this study was undertaken between April 1995 and April 1996. We had expected that as the Child Support Agency had begun operating in 1993 that we would be able to contribute to a preliminary evaluation of how it was operating and what it was achieving. However because so few fathers had any involvement with the CSA as a result the changes in policy and operations, this study is not a particularly good vehicle for exploring the operation of the Act.
However, the Child Support Act was launched with hardly any research having been done on non resident parents and their attitudes and behaviour in relation to their child support obligations.
We found that 77 per cent of the fathers had ever paid maintenance and 57 per cent were currently making maintenance payments. As with the issue of contact this is a much higher proportion than the 30 per cent of lone mothers who reported receiving regular maintenance in Bradshaw and Millar (1991) - a figure subsequently confirmed in the series of studies of lone parents from the Policy Studies Institute (Marsh and McKay 1993, McKay and Marsh 1994, Ford, Marsh and McKay 1995 and Ford, Marsh and Finlayson 1998). As with the disparity in the findings in relation to contact we found that some of the gap could be closed if we controlled for the differences between non resident fathers in this sample and the non resident fathers of the children of lone mothers in Bradshaw and Millar (1991). However by no means all. So there are three possible explanations for the discrepancy: this sample is not representative and biased in favour of non resident fathers who pay maintenance (it is possible that the Bradshaw and Millar is also biased though this is unlikely given that the PSI studies have identical findings); second non resident fathers are exaggerating the extent to which they pay maintenance; or third lone mothers are denying that they receive maintenance. In fact there is no incentive for lone mothers in receipt of Income Support (the majority) to declare that they receive maintenance - because there is no disregard, they risk losing benefit. Non resident fathers on the other hand stand to gain by claiming maintenance payments, in that it would enhance their reputation as responsible fathers.
Paying potential
We have seen that non payment of maintenance is related to whether the father is in employment. The question arises what scope is there for increasing the proportion of fathers who are paying maintenance? If there was to be an effective child support regime what would be its target? What evidence is there that non payers are financially able to pay but nevertheless deliberately avoid their obligation? In an attempt to tackle these questions non payers were divided into one of four groups.
Group 1: No paying potential
These included the unemployed, non active, those on Income Support or with equivalent net disposable Income in the bottom quintile of the income distribution and with shared care of their children. This group consisted of 63 per cent of non payers.
Group 2: Possible paying potential
These included those not in Group 1 but who had new family commitments and equivalent net disposable income in the second and third quintile range, which means that there would be competition for whatever resources were available in the household. They constituted of 13 per cent of the non payers.
Group 3: Probable paying potential
These had income in the second and third quintile of the income distribution, but no new family commitments, which meant that there was no competition for household resources. They consisted of 15 per cent of the non payers.
Group 4: Certain paying potential
They were not in the previous three groups and had income in the top two quintiles. They consisted of nine per cent of the non payers.
These results suggest that there is rather little scope for increasing the proportion of non resident fathers who pay maintenance.
Informal support
Although fathers who paid maintenance were also those more likely to provide informal support, two-thirds of those fathers who were not paying maintenance also provided informal support. The most common forms of provision were children's presents, clothes and shoes, children's pocket money and holidays and outings. Very few fathers offered help with general household expenses or housing costs or car expenses. Not surprisingly as some support items would be given directly to children, patterns of provision reflected the amount of contact fathers had with their children.
The fathers estimated that over a year they spent UK16 per week on informal support. There is evidence of some substitution between formal and informal support. While there was no difference in the mean amounts of informal support between fathers who were paying maintenance and those who were not, the informal support provided by never payers was a much higher proportion of their net disposable incomes. Those fathers not paying maintenance with a certain paying potential were also paying much larger absolute amounts in informal support than the other groups.
Only 15 per cent of the fathers were paying neither maintenance nor informal support. A third of these were classified as having some paying potential but 83 per cent of these saw their children less than yearly or never.
Among those paying maintenance the average amount paid was UK25 per child per week but there was a good deal of variation in the amounts being paid. Fathers who were economically inactive paid only UK17 on average. On average fathers were paying 14 per cent of their net equivalent income in maintenance.
Attitudes to child support
When they were interviewed only 43 per cent of the sample had had any contact with the Child Support Agency and of those only just over half (55 per cent ) had received an interim or final assessment. Although as we have said this means that this study is of limited usefulness as a vehicle for evaluating the CSA, a number of points are worth making on the basis of the findings on non resident fathers' attitudes to child support.
Much has been made of the increases in maintenance amounts brought about by the formula (at least until the revisions in the subsequent acts). Of those with a final assessment the mean amount of maintenance was UK49 or 19 per cent of equivalent average income. However this represented an increase in the amount due in only 41 per cent of cases - for 29 per cent the final assessment was actually less than they had already been paying. Only two thirds of those who had a final assessment said that they were paying the amount assessed at the time of the interview.
The majority 77 per cent of the fathers who had had an increase in their assessment thought that their CSA assessment was unfair. The most popular reasons for this were that it did not take account of living expenses (81 per cent), that the amount was felt to be too high (72 per cent), that it did not take account of housing costs (61 per cent) or the costs of seeing children (53 per cent). There is some evidence in the study of the possible behavioural consequences of the CSA assessments. 61 per cent of those assessed thought that the assessments would have an impact on their present living standards. Just over half the fathers expected that the assessment would affect their personal relations for the worse with their former partner (64 per cent) with their current partner (39 per cent) or their absent child(ren) 27 per cent. Some fathers felt that it would lead to a breakdown in the relationship to their new partners (18 per cent). A third of the fathers said that it would lead to a reduction in informal payments of gifts for their children and substantial minorities thought that it would have an impact on their labour supply and or their willingness to repartner and become a father again.
These behavioural responses to the CSA have been much neglected in discussions about the policy and deserve more detailed investigation. There is evidence from other work that CSA assessment affects the labour supply behaviour of unemployed men increasing the reservation wage (Lowerson 1997) and evidence from our qualitative work and that of others (Clarke, Glendinning and Craig 1998) that the impact on relationships may be quite profound.
The Child Support Act 1991 was based on the principle that biological fathers have an absolute and unreserved responsibility to provide financial support for their children throughout their lives. Not all the fathers accepted this principle. The maintenance obligation is one that was negotiated. Fathers arrived at a commitment to pay maintenance by weighing up the strength of the financial obligation in the context of their own personal, financial and family circumstances and those of the mother and children. In practice the obligation to pay was never unconditional, it always depended on circumstances. It partly depended upon the fathers ability to pay, the children's material need for maintenance and the mother's and her partner's (if she had a partner) ability to provide financially. But most importantly it was the history of the relationship with the mother which was the overriding factor in making a commitment to pay maintenance. From the fathers' perspective it was mothers who were claiming maintenance (albeit on behalf of children), not the children. This claim had to be legitimised before fathers would pay. Primarily the mother's right to claim maintenance on behalf of children was accepted if she at least recognised, if not actively supported, the fathers independent relationship with his child(ren). If the mothers failed to accept the father-child relationship or failed to sustain it through granting contact, then the fathers found this extremely difficult to comprehend. This incomprehension induced an overwhelming sense of victimisation and powerlessness among those men who wanted a relationship with their children but were unable to achieve it in the face of what they saw as selfish and callous mothers. The resultant attitude tended to be that there was no point in paying maintenance as the children would not know their fathers were supporting them, there was no guarantee that the money would be spent for the children's benefit and the fathers were 'paying for a child they were not seeing'. Thus not only would fathers get 'nothing back' in return for maintenance (contact with their children) but payment was meaningless as the fathers' act of giving was rendered invisible to the children themselves. Children would be unaware of the symbolic expression of love and care embedded within the act of giving maintenance money, particularly when, in the absence of contact, there was no other means through which fathers could demonstrate their affections to children directly. Therefore the obligation to pay maintenance was intimately linked with contact through the relationship with the mother, and the different outcomes - of the process of negotiation (payment or non-payment) - primarily hinged upon this relationship.
Conclusion
This chapter has presented some of the results from a recent study of non resident fathers. Non resident fathers are a very common new family form arising from the increase in births outside marriage and the breakdown of marriages and cohabiting relationships. The popular prejudice about the fecklessness of non resident fathers, that typically a father 'walks away from marriage', neither maintains nor shows any interest in the child is not the picture that has emerged from this research. The great majority of the fathers are maintaining a relationship with their children, albeit with considerable difficulty. The majority are also making a financial contribution to their upbringing either formally through child support or informally, though this is difficult given their obligations to new children and their very high levels of unemployment and low income. The evidence suggests that non-payment of child maintenance is due primarily to incapacity to pay. However those who do not pay maintenance seem to be particularly estranged from their children. It is also the case that mothers on Income Support are much less likely to receive child maintenance. It is probable that fathers who have limited financial resources do not see the point of paying maintenance where the mother and the child reap no benefit. In fact it is better all round to support the children informally. The Child Support Act's heavy entry into this emotionally charged area has made relationships between fathers and their new and old partners and between fathers and their children more difficult, without any benefit to the vast majority of lone mothers or indeed the general tax payer. Non resident fathers do not accept that they have an unreserved obligation to pay maintenance and the Child Support Act was bound to fail because it did not understand or seek to understand the complex dynamics in the relationships between a sense of obligation and the emotional bond between the father, his child and the former partner.
We hope that in the end this study will contribute to a greater understanding of the dynamics of non resident fathers and enable policy makers to make rather better policy in the future than they have in the past.