Child Maintenance Service: Reform

When a victim does leave and manages to get the children out as well, she is further victimised by a system that allows her ex-partner to continue to exert his control without consequence. She is left to pick up the pieces and become the sole provider to children they both created. Too many see child maintenance as some unjust tax that they have to pay to fund their ex’s lifestyle. They do not see it for what it is: their financial responsibility towards ensuring that their children have what they need to survive.

My office is no stranger to CMS complaints, and each complaint is as frustrating as the next, with the same problems and the same inadequate response. Most commonly, constituents come to me after receiving a mandatory reconsideration notice prompted by a request from their ex-partner to the CMS to lower payments. Sometimes, those payments are not even being made when a parent requests such a review. The notice invites the custodial parent to submit any evidence that they have in their favour. It does not explain on what grounds the reconsideration has been requested, however, and if the receiving parent does not know what the paying parent’s argument is, how can they provide evidence to counter it?

At the moment, I have two almost identical open cases that are completely unrelated. They both concern single mothers to two young sons and ex-partners who were working full-time until child maintenance was calculated. In a successful effort to avoid payment, the fathers went under the radar by claiming universal credit while working full-time for cash in hand. Both women have extensive evidence of that, which they have shared with the CMS and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs only to be told, “Sorry—nothing we can do.” In one of those cases, a CMS adviser even told a member of my staff over the phone that it was really frustrating and unfortunate because although my constituent had done everything right—everything she possibly could—it just would not change the outcome. That cannot be right.

I have seen parents’ statements showing that the paying parent owes them thousands in unpaid maintenance, yet the CMS has no power to address that—the same CMS that custodial parents are paying to provide that service. We have now reached a point whereby many parents do not even bother making a claim for child maintenance because it is more stress than it is worth for the pitiful amount that they will receive if they are lucky enough to receive any at all.

The National Audit Office’s March report found that there was no clear change in the number of families with functional maintenance arrangements, including those made outside the CMS. It estimated that for only one in three separated families—one third—is the agreed level of maintenance being paid in full. That is shocking. The NAO found the following:

“As at September 2021, 38,000 paying parents (around one in four) with an ongoing arrangement had not paid any maintenance on their Collect & Pay arrangement for more than three months, and 22,000 (around one in seven) had not paid for more than six months”.

The report also highlighted the issues about enforcement, and that enforcement of arrears did not necessarily impact on future compliance. There is really no consequence for avoidant parents.

Although reform of the system is of course hugely welcome, it must get to the root of the issues; it cannot be another plaster over the cracks. The DWP must be sure that it fully understands the heart of the issues, and any proposed solutions must work for the receiving parent. It is categorically wrong that the receiving parent, who already shoulders the overwhelming burden of providing for their children, is charged to use the service. One Parent Families Scotland reports that the minimum cost of raising a child in the UK is £190,000 for single-parent families. That is £30,000 higher than for couples. It is no secret that child maintenance is rarely equitable. The custodial parent will almost always pay significantly more. They should not be charged for the small amounts that they are able to recoup, especially in the worst cases. Although victims of domestic abuse are not charged the 4% on the collect and pay service, that exemption requires disclosure, which can be incredibly difficult for victims.

Ministers must also create strong cross-agency measures that change the way enforcement works, creating faster and better means of sharing intelligence and for how intelligence is then, more importantly, acted on. The CMS needs to be better resourced to respond to the needs of the parents using the service—both receiving and paying parents. I have spent a lot of time dwelling on the worst kind of avoidant parent, but there are many paying parents out there who are compliant, or would like to be, but need some adjustments. Cases need to be reviewed individually; it should not be one size fits all. Communication by the CMS in the round—both to constituents and to MPs’ offices—needs to be much, much better.

I have spent so much of my speech talking about the impact on parents. It is important to remember that at the heart of this are innocent children who are missing out, many having already been through the trauma of the breakdown of their family unit, often exacerbated by a deteriorating relationship between the parents where maintenance is an ongoing issue. I hope that the Minister and his colleagues will keep those children at the forefront of their minds when looking at the CMS and what it could do better. A child should not be living a poorer quality of life than they have to because the parent they live with cannot access the support to which the child is entitled.

The DWP research does not explain why take up of the CMS is lower than expected. The CMS has improved its maintenance calculations and was designed to limit fraud and error, but the DWP has not estimated how many calculations are incorrect due to fraud and error. When an MP is presented with the case as the elected representative, it is very hard, especially when there is a lady sitting across the desk who is in absolute floods of tears and does not know what to do next. There are probably two or three children who are outside in the office, or maybe with their mummy. We can see the pressure on that lady in the office at that time.

CMS debt money is not collected, and outstanding arrears will continue to grow indefinitely. They are forecast to reach an eye-watering £1 billion. I find that quite hard to understand. Perhaps the Minister can tell us what is being done to collect the arrears. I know the Minister is a man who understands the issue very well, and always responds to MPs in a way that gives us some hope for the future. We are looking for that same consideration today, and I want to make some constructive comments.

I want to give some examples of real difficulties from my office. As I mentioned in the Adjournment debate on Tuesday night, the inconsistency of not being able to get the same person at the end of the phone to speak to about a constituent’s case is infuriating. I know that during covid people were ill and that meant changes every day, but even before covid, it was difficult to speak to the same one person about a constituent’s case. Then, when I got put on to somebody else, what happened? It all started again—the process just started with each new person. The timescale it took for things to happen was infuriating. Perhaps the Minister can give us some indication of what is happening in that regard.

There are also the pressures of the job. In Belfast, even before covid-19, many staff were moving on. I hope the Minister can give us some reassurance on what can be done or needs to be done to retain staff. Can the Minister give us some figures for the internal movements in civil service jobs? I do not expect him to have all the answers today. The DWP is under the control of Westminster, so will the Minister give us figures for movement on child maintenance within the DWP Belfast office in particular?

I have had mothers come to see me at the end of their tether with children under their care and without the wage and income that they once had. I have witnessed blatant attempts to not make child maintenance payments. In almost every case—99.9% of cases—it is the man, although sometimes it may be the lady who has the bigger income. In all those cases, it was husbands who had closed their businesses, transferred moneys and removed moneys from bank accounts prior to those accounts being checked, and who had handed valuable properties to parents or new partners. I know that marriages and relationships break down, but that anyone should try to walk away or abandon their children is outrageous.

I am aware of people who are property millionaires on paper and had large bank accounts, yet the hesitancy of the CMS to pursue them effectively was truly frustrating. They returned financial accounts showing a profit of less than £15,000 per year, when they are driving a car worth more than 30 grand and are sitting in properties that show their income is higher than that. If someone is withdrawing moneys from the bank account before a relationship break-up, there is a case to answer.

Why is it so important? Ladies are squeezed financially. They cannot pay their mortgage when they are left with all the bills. They cannot pay the electric. In some cases, they cannot even buy food for the house. They are desperate.

My constituents have given me lots of examples. In my office, as I am sure is the case in everybody’s office here, we quite regularly get such cases. We find it frustratingly difficult to negotiate through their process with constituents. I want to raise some points to the Minister. First, is it possible to put urgency into the request from us, as elected representatives, to the CMS? There is real urgency to get things done quickly and to, importantly, have a process at the end of it. Secondly, can we assign one officer or staff member to look after each case? I am ever mindful that officers might be off sick, but there should be someone who knows the case, so that we do not have four, five or six people. Thirdly, checking the bank accounts before the breakup would give an indication, I suspect, of where the process is.

We should listen to the wife in those cases, the lady who knows. She knows where the dead bodies are buried. She knows where her husband’s moneys are. She knows what property he owns. She knows about the bank accounts. She knows. We should be looking towards that evidential base. It is not right that husbands can abscond or ignore CMS letters. The legal authority to investigate must be central to the obligations. I know that the Minister has great understanding and that he wants to assist. I ask him to hear the four requests and others have made. I appreciate the evidential base that they have, but I do feel that the DWP can do better and must do better.

I am probably old fashioned. I am a traditional person, and I believe in the sanctity of marriage and commitment. That is just me. A man must remember his obligation to his wife and children. We need the law of the land tightened, thereby ensuring impartial treatment for men and women. There is much to do, Minister—much to achieve and change. I value the Minister’s help and commitment to trying to make changes that ensure we have a system that really works for the lady. I think that is the way it should be.

A recent National Audit Office report, which was touched on earlier by previous speakers, exposes the failures of the Child Maintenance Service and shows that it simply is not working for far too many lone parents. The report found that the UK Government do not appear to have learned one of the key lessons from the now defunct Child Support Agency about preventing appears from building up, and that enforcement can be too slow to be effective. The report suggests that unless the UK Government write off more CMS debt, outstanding arrears will grow indefinitely. As my hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell and Wishaw said, they are forecast to reach £1 billion by March 2031 at current rates, and the Department for Work and Pensions does not yet fully understand why those without an effective arrangement do not use its service. It could do more to help prevent around half of direct pay arrangements failing and leaving maintenance unpaid. There seem to be significant problems with its customer service, which undermines trust in its service, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), my hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell and Wishaw, and the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) identified in their contributions.

The latest DWP figures are for the quarter ending in December 2021. Of the 158,400 paying parents due to pay the collect and pay service, 51,300 paid no maintenance and 107,100 paid some maintenance—and of those, 36,500 paid up to 90% of the maintenance due for the quarter, and 70,600 paid over 90%. The Department for Work and Pensions figures also show that since 2012, when the Child Maintenance Service began, £451.1 million in unpaid maintenance has accumulated. That amounts to some 8% of all the maintenance due to be paid since the start of the service. The SNP has made it clear that we are calling for effective enforcement action to be taken in the collection of maintenance arrears.

Like the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, I am grateful for the excellent briefings that we have received from One Parent Families Scotland, Gingerbread and Mumsnet. In the survey that Gingerbread and Mumsnet did in England in 2020, 86% of Child Maintenance Service customers said that the service had allowed their ex-partner to financially control or abuse them post separation. Some 83% said they would likely never receive what they were owed in arrears, and just 11% of those parents described their experience of using the Child Maintenance Service as positive. That really cannot continue, and people need more confidence in the Child Maintenance Service going forward.

Lone parents and their children are facing increased hardship as a result of the combined effects of the pandemic and the cost of living crisis, which is why it is vital that family income must be protected for over 800,000 children across the United Kingdom who rely on it. Some 803,000 children are covered by Child Maintenance Service arrangements—an increase of 5,000 since September 2021—with 510,000 covered through direct pay arrangements and the rest covered through the collect and pay service. The number of children covered by Child Maintenance Service arrangements has increased steadily over the last two years.

Lone parents of children are more likely to be in poverty, so any reduction in income is likely to be particularly harmful, which means that, in the face of the cost of living crisis, maintenance matters even more for protecting children from poverty. That is why the SNP is calling on the Government to introduce a minimum maintenance payment to provide parents with care and their children a guaranteed income, in order to prevent hardship and ensure a dignified standard of living. We are also clear that a long-overdue root-and-branch review of the Child Maintenance Service is needed—not only to enforce the payments, but to ensure that the process does not put vulnerable families through additional stress. It is ultimately the children who are being permanently disadvantaged.

The Scottish Government are using their devolved powers to ensure that children and families are supported during this difficult time and prevent them from being pushed into fuller hardship. The Scottish Government have invested £770 million per year in cost of living support, including in a range of family benefits not available elsewhere in the UK, doubling the Scottish child payment, mitigating the bedroom tax and increasing Scottish benefits by 6%, which was the figure in April. The Scottish Government are putting money into the pockets of families now and helping them to deal with that cost of living crisis.

I look forward to the Minister’s remarks and response. I would hope that he can confirm that there will be a root-and-branch review, and that he will give us some positive news on staffing and other matters.

Secondly, as other Members have already said, every Member of Parliament knows only too well what happens when the service goes wrong. The problems in my own case load have two features: the time taken to resolve issues is simply too long, as people find the length of time they are waiting incredibly stressful, and the enforcement action taken by the service is often not effective—a point that has been very well and amply made. That is frustrating and, as has been said, often dissuades people from using the service at all. I cannot believe that a Government of any colour or hue would want an important public service such as this one to put people off.

I am anxious to hear from the Minister about the plans for reform. I hope that we can move quickly to get a better service, not least given that the NAO found that it could take years before payments are made. The NAO also uncovered the issue of enforcement, and said that it

“has not been properly built into the Universal Credit system”.

I think the Government will want to address that.

Finally, I agree with fellow Members on the issue of domestic abuse. Unfortunately, I know only too well from my own constituents that parents who are victims of domestic abuse often see that abuse continued via the officers of the state. Again, I do not believe that a Government of any kind would wish their own services or operations to be used by perpetrators of abuse to continue their abuse once a relationship has come to an end. I simply do not believe that any Government would want that.

We are learning much more about how this continuation of abuse is done and how institutions of the state can protect against that. As the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw said, it is crucial that we have a trauma-informed service in every function of DWP work and that we continually look to reform, given that we now know more about how domestic abuse is perpetrated. I hope the Minister will respond to those three points about poverty, improving the service so that it actually does what we want it to and making sure that it is informed by the suffering and trauma of victims of domestic abuse, and I look forward to listening to what he has to say.