Covid-19: Child Maintenance Service

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con) [V]]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) on securing this important debate, and I thank the Minister for taking time earlier today to speak to me about some of the cases that are of concern to me in my constituency.

Once upon a time, I was the Minister with responsibility for the CMS, and my worry is that our debate will degenerate into an attack on the hard-working staff. I know from my own experience how diligent they are—sometimes in the most difficult of circumstances, trying to track down parents who refuse to pay and investigating those very difficult cases where people deliberately hide their income. I think there is a special place in hell for those who go out of their way to disguise income to prevent their former partner from being able to feed their children, or to buy school shoes or a new winter coat.

From the work that has been done by Gingerbread and others, I am conscious that single parents have been hit very hard during this pandemic, and we know that 80% of them are women. As Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, I am extremely interested in how well the CMS has coped with the many cases in which income has varied over the course of the pandemic. Of course, that means that variations will have to be efficient and quick. As parents come off furlough, it is possible for their income to go up as well as down.

We know that the strain on families during the pandemic has increased. I thank the Minister for the work that he is doing with victims of domestic abuse, and I thank my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister for the priority that he has given to that. It is important to reflect on the fact that not all domestic abuse is physical. Some of it is financial, and I have heard numerous times from constituents over the last nine months about the financial abuse they have suffered at the hands of ex-partners, and how the CMS has been drawn into that as variation after variation is requested and income is disguised. I have been privy to the emails from parents threatening, “Unless you agree to this figure, I will just keep asking for a variation so you get nothing.”

I also heard this morning from a constituent who has been forced to contact her former partner’s employer herself, because the CMS has not been in a position to chase up the direct deduction from earnings order that she was entitled to. She feels very strongly, and she is right, that she should not be the one who has to chase it up. If the CMS has a deduction from earnings order in place, it should be contacting the employer when the money has not gone through.

Finally, I would like to raise the case of my constituent Stuart McAuliffe, whose issues with the CMS long predate the pandemic but have been exacerbated by it. Some of that is about the fact that CMS staff did not have access to records at the beginning of the pandemic, but for years he has been asking for a breakdown of the amount that he owes in arrears—the charges that he believes were wrongly levied as part of a collect and pay arrangement, when he had been on direct pay and had been paying regularly. He feels very strongly that he should never have been moved to collect and pay, and that those charges have been accrued wrongly.

My constituent has asked for a schedule of payments, but he has been told that that information is not available. Surely, it must be available. Anybody who is involved with the CMS should be entitled to look at a breakdown of what they have paid, what arrears there may be and what charges may be on their account. The only information that he gets from the CMS is that it cannot provide him with that detail. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister if he will look at the case personally so that my constituent can finally get some resolution.

I think it is crucial that we recognise that the CMS is working in incredibly difficult times, and that it has many challenges in front of it. However, it is critical that paying parents and parents with care are given the support that they need at this difficult time. As the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw said, no child should be going without and no child should be suffering because of the CMS.