‘Horror’ of how child support agencies wage war on our forces heroes

CMS has got us in its sights, making us homeless and even driving us to suicide, claims Bosnia vet

A former soldier has been waging a 11 year private war against the UK’s child maintenance service.

He claims forces people are constantly in the CMS sights because they are easy targets.

And their treatment by the agency is literally driving some of them on to the streets and sadly in to mental break-downs.

Former Para Craig Bulman (main picture) says the child support authorities destroyed his own life. Now he fights cheek by jowl with war heroes who are also being driven over the edge.

He says he can prove that many of his former colleagues are being made homeless as the CMS ‘steals’ their houses to pay ‘fictitious’ arrears.

The ex Red Devil who survived action in Bosnia and Northern Ireland said: “Post traumatic stress disorder used to be something you saw in battle fields but now squaddies and ex forces people are becoming victims of it at the social care offices.

“I left the army due to the shocking treatment I was getting off the CSA and a nasty divorce I was going through. The CSA had interfered in a private arrangement my first ex-wife and I had between us.

“She wanted to continue with our private arrangement and my children were financially worse off when the CSA got themselves involved.”

And Liberal Democrat Defence Spokesman Jamie Stone agrees with Craig saying the Government should be making it easier for veterans, service personnel, and their families to connect. There should be readily available access mental health care for them too. 

He said: “Veterans are struggling to access vital mental health support. We are letting them down.”

Mr Stone then related the story of army vet, Mark Lister. Mark is a Combat Stress volunteer in the Highlands who served as a Forward Observer in the Royal Artillery for eighteen years.

He told the MP that one of the things that stood out was the stark difference between combat trauma experienced by a soldeir and trauma experienced by a civilian.

Mark said: “Only a veteran is going to know how to help another veteran. We don’t want to have to explain the ins and outs of the Gulf geography. We don’t want to go through explaining all that. We just want to speak about our trauma with someone who gets what it’s like.”

Craig Bulman said: “We should be getting right behind this, finally we have proof of what’s been said for a decade.”

And Craig welcomed what he described as a positive response from the director of a Catholic mental health project.

Ben Bano, director of Welcome Me As I Am, insisted that those who have served in the army, as well as those currently serving, are at a higher risk of mental health issues.

Ben said: “The lack of resources to address the mental health issues of armed services personnel and veterans is of particular concern. Mental health issues are often complex and manifest themselves for years after the experience of traumatic episodes.”

The number of suicides among those in the UK armed forces has steadily risen in recent years, according to Craig.

Ministry of Defence statistics show that just one person took their own life in 2014, However, nine killed themselves in 2017. There were five suicides in 2018.

At the same time, Craig says, two out of four MoD mental health centres were rated as inadequate or needing improvement by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) between April 2017 and January 2019.

A report published sometime ago by MPs on the Commons Defence Committee said it was a ‘scandal’ that the NHS budget of more than £150 billion earmarked less than £10 million to veteran-specific mental health services

Another child maintenance campaigner told the Preservation Society: “Any individual working for the CSA or CMS and DWP – and any MP linked to these organisations – need to be held accountable in court for these people and families.

“A new Freedom of Information request needs to go in and MPs need to be asked an updated question – what are the latest figures.

“A public enquiry needs to be held as soon as possible, before more suffer at these organised failures.”

Craig sees the armed forces as easy targets … he said: “I guess the armed forces do have a high divorce rate due to the operational tours during the Bosnia campaign regiments were doing back to back tours so this was putting a strain on marriages. “The thing which is disturbing in the armed forces we are often exposed to dangerous situations and if your mind is not focused on the job then you are a liability.”

However, another study says that two in five parents are still failing to pay their ex-partners.

The charity Gingerbread, which supports single-parent families, says that payments can lift single-parent families out of poverty and it is “simply not acceptable” that more than 100,000 children nationally are not receiving maintenance.

The CMS is supposed to take money directly from these parents’ earnings or their bank account if they try to avoid payments, and can eventually take them to court.

Across Great Britain, 33 per cent of the 139,300 parents who had to pay through the Collect and Pay scheme failed to pay their child maintenance. Recently this figure stood at 38 per cent.

A spokesperson from the Department of Work and Pensions said that: “We’re committed to improving the way CMS works and we have new powers to tackle people who don’t pay what they owe.

“Every day we use civil enforcement action to secure payments on behalf of children and the amount being arranged is up 20 per cent over the past year.

“We’re also doing much better at getting child maintenance debt legally recognised, through Liability Orders – and that’s important because once that happens we can take really strong action like forcing the sale of property.”

But things are getting tougher for absent parents.

Craig said: “ I am seeing a lot of cases from the early days of the CSA where people no longer have access to bank statements and evidence to support they have made payments and the children are now in their 30s.
“I do not just help Veterans and Armed Forces I have been helping members of the public. In 2016 I was in a Facebook group where we were heavily involved in compelling the National Audit Office to investigate the CSA/CMS over their false arrears issue. As you will know the NAO will not investigate individual cases but due to the high volume of complaints, they received about false arrears from our group they decided to investigate.”

Craig says: “I have been fighting against this very corrupt and despotic governmental body the Child Support Agency since 2010. They have an absolute shocking history and are responsible for thousands of suicides as a result of their draconian behaviour. “I have had a terrible experience with this abhorrent government. They started abusing their powers against me in 1996 just before I was deployed to Bosnia. They interfered with a perfectly amicable private arrangement between my ex-wife and I, their unwarranted and unwanted intervention caused a lot of bad feeling between my ex wife and I which ruined the relationship between me and my children.

“In 2010 things got very bad between the Child Support Agency and me.

“I was made homeless they ruined my career and were responsible for pushing me to suicide causing a severe psychiatric injury. I was paying for my children voluntarily, they did not need to take such harsh enforcement action against me; they abused their powers when I challenged them.

“I have created a step by step guide of how to deal with the Child Support Agency; many people have used it and have had some excellent results.”

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