Onika, you need to appreciate that the guide you provided a link to is only that, a guide, and it does not claim to be a definitive statement of the actual law. And like many UKBA guidance pages, it is not necessarily 100% accurate, or different parts are contradictory.
I think the clue for you is in the index of the document. That is, at 3.4 the index entry is :-
Exceptions as a result of nationality, nationality of partner or current situation
So dealing with those three possibilities separately :-
- (Your) Nationality - given that your country, Ghana, has not entered into a Social Security Reciprocal Agreement with the UK, this possibility is of no assistance to you
- Nationality of Partner - you don't have a partner, you are a single parent, and therefore it must be the case that this possibility is also of no assistance to you
- Current situation - there is no evidence that this applies to you. That is, you don't need to claim Public Funds temporarily because your funds from overseas have dried up. So this is also of no assistance to you.
Your problem, in a nutshell, is that when reading 3.4.2., which is headed "Exceptions as a result of living with a family member", you are assuming that you can class your (British) child as a family member in order to assist you in making benefit claims. And I don't think you can do that. I think that whoever wrote that guidance for UKBA assumed that someone reading it would think that family member refers to spouse or partner, and they were not thinking that anyone would read a child as assisting a benefit claim.
So my conclusion is that because of the "No recourse to Public Funds" restriction on your visa, you really should not be claiming Child Benefit or Tax Credits.
You posted :-
At the moment am claiming CB, CTC and WTC have been b4 2005.
-: to which I say, I suspect that back in 2005 you were living with your British husband, and accordingly at that time it was no problem you claiming Child Benefit. Also the Tax Credits claim would have been claimed in joint names, and so again, thanks to reg 3(2), Tax Credits (Immigration) Regulations 2003, that joint claim was totally OK. But later you separated, and started claiming Tax Credits as a sole claimant, and it was at that point that the problem starts arising.
This is a rather complex matter, and I urge anyone who thinks they can contribute to the technical argument to do just that.