Breakdown of Number of Maintenance Order Applications Received by Family Justice Court in Past Five Years
Ministry of LawSpeakers
Summary
This question concerns Ms Carrie Tan’s inquiry about the number of maintenance order applications and the demographic breakdown by spousal income for married and divorced applicants over the past five years. Minister for Law Mr K Shanmugam responded that applications for fresh maintenance orders have declined recently and categorized these into fresh orders, variations, and enforcement actions. He noted that marital status data is not always indicative of the marriage since guardians or siblings may apply for child maintenance. Regarding demographics, the Minister provided data on respondents' income from non-mandatory application fields available since 2017. Ultimately, he stated that no discernible trend could be identified from the statistics on applications for fresh maintenance orders relative to the respondents' income.
Transcript
9 Ms Carrie Tan asked the Minister for Law (a) for the past five years, what has been the number of maintenance order applications received by the Family Justice Court, broken down by applicants who are (i) still married and (ii) divorced respectively; and (b) what is the demographic breakdown by spousal income of (i) married applicants and (ii) divorced applicants.
Mr K Shanmugam: Applications for maintenance orders in the Family Justice Courts (“FJC”) can broadly be categorised into three groups:
(a) applications for fresh maintenance orders, made for the first time, where no other maintenance order exists;
(b) applications to vary or discharge existing maintenance orders; and
(c) applications to enforce existing maintenance orders.
The applications can be made: (a) by women or incapacitated men for themselves; or (b) for the maintenance of a child.
The number of applications for fresh maintenance orders in the last five years is shown in Table 1, with a breakdown according to the marital status of the applicant at the point of application. For cases involving maintenance of a child, the applicant need not be the spouse / former spouse, but can be the child’s guardian or the adult sibling. Hence, the marital status reflected is not necessarily indicative of the marriage in question. The number of applications for fresh maintenance orders has declined over the last five years.
Ms Tan also asked for the demographic breakdown by spousal income of married and divorced applicants. As applications for maintenance orders may be made by a range of persons – spouse, former spouse and child’s guardian, it would be more accurate to provide the income of the respondent.
Data on the respondents' income, based on non-mandatory fields completed by applicants when the application is made, is only available from 2017. The statistics on the applications for fresh maintenance orders, by applicants who were married and who were divorced, broken down by the respondents' income, are in Table 2. There is no discernible trend from the data.
