Government slammed for rejecting Child Maintenance Service reform advice

A committee of MPs has criticised the government for rejecting most of its recommendations for reform of the embattled Child Maintenance Service (CMS). 

The CMS was launched in 2012 to help secure payments from absent parents – mostly fathers – towards raising their children, but has faced criticism both for placing too many financial demands on cash-strapped parents and failing to collect enough maintenance money.

In April the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee published a report criticising the CMS for being ineffective at enforcing payment of maintenance by some parents, and imposing unaffordable payments on others.

The report recommended that the CMS should step in faster when direct payments between parents are not working, the means-testing of fees charged for collecting maintenance directly from absent parents and the waiving of fees in cases of domestic abuse, and called on the government to update maintenance levels and thresholds.

But in its response to the committee’s report, the government accepted the call to change how calculations are made for determining child maintenance levels, and the need to make contacting the service easier, but rejected most of its other recommendations.

Sir Stephen Timms, chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, said: ‘The government’s response to our report will do little to alleviate the frustrations and distress encountered on a daily basis by many parents with experience of the Child Maintenance Service.

‘While there is some commitment to improving customer service, action to address long-standing and well-known problems with compliance, reduce fraud and error and make fees fairer, falls short of what is needed to make the service an effective vehicle for tackling child poverty. The Committee will continue to press the government on the changes needed to ensure children are getting the payments they are entitled to.’

Last summer the Public Accounts Committee of MPs slammed the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which runs the CMS, for ‘achieving no more for children of separated families than under the previous, discredited Child Support Agency’.

According to CMS figures covering the final quarter of 2022, 35 percent of parents – mostly fathers – who were due to pay maintenance, failed to pay any during that period.

In June the DWP admitted that parents were having to wait more than a year for complaints against the CMS.

Image: Juliane Liebermann