Ten years after the “discredited” Child Support Agency was replaced and billions of pounds of unpaid child maintenance debt remaining from CSA schemes written off, the The Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons says the Department for Work & Pensions “is achieving no more for children of separated families” through its replacement Child Maintenance Service.
Around half of children in separated families – 1.8 million children – continue to receive no support from their non-resident parent, and enforcement can be too slow to be effective.
Unpaid maintenance owed to parents on Collect & Pay has increased by more than £1 million a week to a total of £440 million in October 2021, and the NAO recently concluded that unless DWP writes more off, outstanding arrears will grow to £1 billion by March 2031 and “indefinitely thereafter”. “The scale of unfulfilled obligations once again looms as a major issue” that DWP “has no long-term strategy for tackling”.
DWP’s reforms were based on the assumption that most parents can come to agreement on child maintenance between themselves, but the PAC says the Department “has done little to ensure this is the case, or to address concerns that its approach risks causing a further deterioration in the parents’ relationship or exacerbating abuse and coercive control”.
DWP will only investigate a parent understating their income if it is reported by a parent receiving child maintenance – something they “can be understandably reluctant to do”.
“Serious constraints on parents’ ability to pay will inevitably hamper” any new DWP effort to collect maintenance or enforce the collection of arrears – with some Paying Parents facing a “poverty trap where there is little incentive for them to work more”.
Fewer customers are satisfied with the CMS and “DWP upholds more complaints for every 1,000 customers on child maintenance than any other area of its business”.
Dame Meg Hillier MP, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said:
“There are still thousands of children not getting the money they need from non-resident parents. Even if the promise to improve compliance actually materialises, DWP will only buy itself a couple of years before child maintenance arrears reaches £1 billion again. There’s no strategy to bring that down except adding to the billions of owed child support that it’s already written off and won’t collect.
“The PAC would like an explanation how it’s going to fix this now, as we head deeper into a cost-of-living crisis that’s worsening the UK’s already shameful child poverty rates. Now more than ever children need this money.”
