Child Maintenance Services

Debate between Jamie Stone and Munira Wilson

Tuesday 17th January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered potential improvements to child maintenance services.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I am very grateful for being granted the time to shed light on the Child Maintenance Service, which I will refer to as the CMS, not least because I, along with the help of colleagues, set up a new all-party parliamentary group on this issue in October last year, and because the Government have published an important review this morning, which I will come to shortly. I want to put on the record my thanks to organisations such as Gingerbread, One Parent Families Scotland, Refuge, Women’s Aid and Surviving Economic Abuse, which have taken the time to educate the APPG on this issue. I also thank the brave constituents from all over the UK who have shared their experiences with us.

To put it plainly, I am afraid that the CMS is not working. It is failing receiving parents, paying parents and survivors of domestic abuse, but, most of all, it is failing children. Roughly 120,000 children in the UK receive no maintenance, and a high number receive a meagre portion of what they are entitled to. Since launching the APPG, we have received floods of correspondence from people who do not know which way to turn. I put it to you, Mr Twigg, that the CMS is broken, and we MPs cannot make it work on an individual case-by-case basis. I believe it is time for a complete overhaul of the service.

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. He started by rightly pointing out the many cases that cross constituency MPs’ desks, and our caseworkers have to deal with very sensitive and difficult cases, the vast majority of which involve mothers. I have had a terrible case of a mother tirelessly pursuing her ex-husband to pay up for nine years, and he has found every which way to game the system. I have also heard from a father who has erroneously paid £18,000 of arrears, despite having evidence from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs that he was not earning money during the period for which he has been charged. Does that not show the complete incompetence of the CMS? It needs to be able to work with HMRC and communicate clearly with parents, but it also needs to have the teeth to take enforcement action where parents are not paying up.

[Jamie Stone]

My hon. Friend makes some very valid points indeed. Perhaps I should also pay tribute to the staff in my own office, and in the offices of all other MPs, who do fantastic, challenging and difficult work. It is very stressful for the staff members involved, so I pay tribute to them.

I want to focus on the ways in which the CMS can better support survivors of domestic abuse and safeguard receiving parents and their children from falling into poverty. It is quite clear that the CMS is not specialised or tailored to support survivors of domestic and economic abuse, so we in the APPG are glad to hear that the Government plan to use Dr Samantha Callan’s recommendations to introduce new domestic abuse training for CMS caseworkers, which will be delivered by a third-party external agency rather than in-house, as set out in the review published this morning, for which I thank His Majesty’s Government. However, our concern is that this does not go far enough. The training should be delivered by a specialist organisation, such as any of the organisations I have already thanked.

I am also glad to hear that the Government plan to protect survivors from having direct contact with abusive ex-partners when trying to obtain child maintenance payments, by giving them the choice to be moved on to collect and pay, the system by which the CMS collects a payment from the paying parent and pays it to the receiving parent without either party having to make direct contact, allowing claims to be made safely. That is an important point.

I understand that the system is more costly for the Government, but we strongly urge that these charges to the paying and receiving parents—20% and 4% respectively —are dropped for survivors of domestic abuse. The charges exacerbate already abusive relationships; they make them worse. Abolishing them would also be a simple way to safeguard against further refusal to make payments.

When it comes to safeguarding receiving parents from falling below the poverty line, I support the call for the CMS to make mandatory minimum payments to survivor receiving parents and to chase the paying parents themselves. This would take the burden of feeling forced to make direct contact away from the survivor and protect them from potential financial ruin. Given the historic failure of the CMS to enforce payments from perpetrators of economic abuse and the current cost of living crisis, we believe that the Government should seriously consider this recommendation.

Many of the problems come down to a fundamental breakdown of communication between the Department for Work and Pensions, and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. Perpetrators of economic abuse are able to get away with declaring no income if they are self-employed or a business-owner, therefore escaping the obligation to pay maintenance; this will be a situation familiar to Members of this House from all parties. The perpetrators are also able to avoid payments as the CMS has no legal enforcement capability, despite child maintenance being a legal obligation.

The Public Accounts Committee found that unpaid maintenance owed to parents on collect and pay to distribute payments is set to rise to £1 billion by March 2031. Can you believe that? The review by the National Audit Office in March 2022 stated that the work of the CMS has

“not, so far, increased the number of effective child maintenance arrangements across society.”