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Data on the Number of Maintenance Enforcement Applications Filed in the Family Justice Courts in Past Three Years

Type: Parliamentary Questions

Topic(s): Financial Assistance & Social Support, Children & Families

Published on 14 February 2022

Ms Hany Soh asked the Minister for Social and Family Development (a) for each year over the past three years, what is the number of maintenance enforcement applications filed in the Family Justice Courts; and (b) of these, how many are (i) incapacitated male applicants (ii) female applicants (iii) male applicants filed on behalf of minor children (iv) female applicants filed on behalf of minor children (v) filed during the course of marriage and (vi) cases that managed to reach an amicable resolution at the mediation stage, respectively.

Answer

1 Maintenance enforcement applications are filed under Section 71 of the Women’s Charter. Section 71(1) empowers the Court to order any of the enforcement measures listed if any person fails to make one or more payments required to be made under a maintenance order. Such a maintenance order may be granted to a wife, incapacitated husband or on behalf of a minor child.

2 The number of maintenance enforcement applications filed for the last three years is shown in Table 1 below.

Table 1 Maintenance Enforcement Applications, 2019 – 2021

Year

2019

2020

2021

Total number of maintenance enforcement applications

2,290

(100.0%)

1,650

(100.0%)

1,464

(100.0%)

a. Applications filed by females

2,248

(98.2%)

1,611

(97.6%)

1,432

(97.8%)

  1. Applications filed by females on behalf of minor child^

689

469

401

b. Applications filed by males on behalf of minor child

8

(0.3%)

9

(0.5%)

6

(0.4%)

c. Applications filed by incapacitated husbands

0

(0.0%)

0

(0.0%)

0

(0.0%)

d. Others*

34

(1.5%)

30

(1.8%)

26

(1.8%)

Source Family Justice Courts

3 The statistics on the number of maintenance enforcement applications filed during the course of marriage and the number of cases that managed to reach an amicable resolution at the mediation stage are not available, so the Ministry is unable to provide such a breakdown for the past three years.

Note
^ The number of applications filed by females on behalf of minor child is a subset of the number of applications filed by females.
* Some maintenance orders were granted prior to 2017 but the maintenance enforcement applications were made subsequently from 2018 onwards. Due to limitations of the IT system prior to 2017, FJC is unable to match these applications under the three categories (a), (b) and (c) above.