Under the Family Law (Scotland) Act 1985, we would normally calculate part of your award based on your parents’ income. However, we can exceptionally exempt you from this process if there is a permanent breakdown in your relationship with them and there is no sign of this being resolved in the future.
Before we can treat you as being exempt from taking your parents’ income into account, we must have relevant evidence which confirms that the estrangement is permanent or that at present it would be harmful to your well-being if you were to try and contact your parents.
We cannot consider you to be exempt from taking your parents’ income into account where there has been some form of family dispute or disagreement that has resulted in a breakdown of communication that could be resolved through mediation. In addition, where there is no physical risk to you, we would expect there to be no communication between you and your parent(s) for at least a year before we could consider an estrangement permanent.
Examples of the evidence we will accept in support of your claim are as follows:
- A letter from the police or a social worker confirming there has been violence in the home; or
- A letter from the family doctor confirming that there is personal or medical problems within the family that means it would be advisable for you not to have any contact with your parent(s); or
- A letter from a solicitor confirming they have been involved in a serious family dispute/problems that has resulted in you not having any contact with your parents.
If you cannot provide any of the evidence above, we will write to your parents on your behalf and ask them to give us details of their income. If we cannot contact your parents, we will then allow you to give an account of your circumstances in person at an interview, generally held at our office in Edinburgh. However, we can hold the interview at your college or university if you would experience high travel costs getting to SAAS.
The personal contact will allow us to gain a first hand impression and form a clearer understanding of your circumstances. We will write to you immediately after the interview with our decision.
Depending on the grounds we have granted you estrangement, we may ask you to prove to us, in each year of your course, that your circumstances have not changed.