Asked by: David Taylor (Labour - Hemel Hempstead)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps she is taking to ensure that the Child Maintenance Service takes action against people who are in arrears.
Answered by Andrew Western - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
The Child Maintenance Service (CMS) will do everything within its powers to make sure parents comply and has made significant improvements to the process to speed up action when payments first break down and to target enforcement action more effectively.
Where parents fail to take responsibility for paying for their children, the CMS will not hesitate to use the full range of strong enforcement powers available. These include, using Enforcement Agents (previously known as bailiffs) to take control of goods, forcing the sale of property, removal of driving license or UK passport, deductions directly from earnings and bank accounts or even commitment to prison.
8% (£682.1 million) of the total maintenance due to be paid since the CMS began, remains to be collected through Collect & Pay but this is falling.
In the past year to September 2024, the CMS collected £16.8 million from paying parents with civil enforcement actions in process and an additional £5.4 million from paying parents with our most serious enforcement action in process.
In the twelve months to September 2024, there were 2,857 applications to the courts in England, Wales and Scotland for our most serious enforcement powers. Of these the courts issued two immediate prison sentences and 316 suspended prison sentences.
Asked by: David Taylor (Labour - Hemel Hempstead)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps she is taking to ensure that the Child Maintenance Service takes action against people committing fraud by hiding assets in order to avoid paying child maintenance.
Answered by Andrew Western - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
Most parents pay some or all their maintenance liability without issue however, the Child Maintenance Service is aware of a small number of parents whose maintenance liability is inconsistent with their financial resources, usually because they can choose to support themselves via a complex arrangement of assets instead of, or in addition to, taking a salary.
Cases involving complex income or suspected fraudulent behaviour can be looked into by the FIU. This is a specialist team which can request information from financial institutions to check the accuracy of information the CMS is given.
In the quarter ending September 2024, 300 financial investigation cases were referred to the Financial Investigations Unit (FIU) in addition to 875 ongoing cases from previous quarters. In the same quarter, 340 financial investigations were completed of which 210 resulted in a maintenance assessment change.