Who is Youth Allowance for the parent or the child?

If i apply for child maintenance, does it affect my child tax credit and income support?

• I am divorced and i have 2 children, who are 11 and 6. I am not working as I am a full time carer of my 11 years old. I am receiving child benefit, child tax credit, carers allowance, my daughters DLA and income support. I am a responsible parent of my 2 children. My ex doesn't seem my children as he lives somewhere. He works part time and earns £800 per 4 weeks before he moves out from us. At the moment, I am not sure about his earnings. (May be he works full time. It's my guess) My question is;- If i apply child maintenance, does it affect all my benefit? (especially for child tax credit and income support)

• Answer:

  Actually not, whatever other answers may have told you, since April 2010 there has been a full disregard on child maintenance payments when working out benefit incomes, unbelievable of course, it was presumably because the governmemnt wanted to incentivise claiming payments and there was going to be no incentive to claim if they merely replaced benefit income. It seems now that your child support won't affect your benefits, but it could be changed when the Universal Credit is introduced from 2013.