Child Maintenance Service: Reform

Chris Stephens Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2022 Westminster Hall

[Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Rees. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) on securing the debate. She has campaigned on the issue for many years now, and I hope that much of what she has said will be taken on board by the Minister and that action will be taken.

The SNP is clear that, at a time of a cost of living crisis, child maintenance matters even more to protect children from poverty. We are calling for a long-overdue root-and-branch review of the Child Maintenance Service so that it can work more effectively for the children it is supposed to serve. I also want to take the opportunity to ask the Minister about the 91,000 civil service jobs that are supposed to be disappearing. I know you will appreciate this point, Ms Rees, as a friend of the worker. A press release last Friday said that 91,000 civil jobs will disappear. I would hope that not one of them is from the Child Maintenance Service, because it seems to me they need more workers. No worker in the Child Maintenance Service should find themselves out of work as a result of those changes.

What we want to focus on today are the clear, systemic errors that happen and affect so many people. That is why in the root-and-branch review, we have to come back first to the fact that the Government introduced charges for parents seeking support from a former partner through the child maintenance service. There is a fee of £20 for using CMS, unless someone is under 19 or has suffered domestic or violent abuse. The paying parents must pay an additional fee of 20% to use the service, and the receiving parent 4%. The fees imposed on receiving parents using the child maintenance service include the 4% surcharge for using collect and pay and the original £20 charge. I believe that that unfairly penalises receiving parents who are not receiving proper payments, and charging lone parents to access their right to support for their child is deplorable. We would certainly demand an end to that tax on child support, and we should continue to demand an end to Child Maintenance Service fees for parents receiving the payments.

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.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Rutley]

I give way to the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens).

[Chris Stephens]

I thank the Minister and, as my constituency takes in Ibrox stadium, I associate myself with his remarks. I inform the House that an early-day motion will be tabled, praising the Rangers team for their achievements in the Europa League this season.

[David Rutley]

I give way to the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw.