Covid-19: Child Maintenance Service

Karen Buck Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab) [V]]

This has been a welcome, albeit brief, opportunity to consider an essential service, and I thank the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) for securing it. We have heard some important contributions, all of which stressed two critical things: first, our thanks to the staff who have continued to work hard during these challenging months to keep the show on the road; and, secondly, the critical, real-world experience of parents who are looking after their children in very difficult circumstances and on very low incomes.

We know only too well that the pandemic has had an impact on the delivery of a whole range of public services. Child maintenance is easily forgotten, but it is very important that we understand the scale of the impact and learn lessons from the experience of the past year, particularly—hon. Members reinforced this point—in the light of the predicted rise in unemployment, and the wider economic fallout from the pandemic, which will inevitably disrupt maintenance arrangements for some time to come.

The Child Maintenance Service manages more than half a million arrangements for child support, affecting three quarters of a million children. To underline the importance of that, I am happy to quote the words of the Minister in the other place, Baroness Stedman-Scott:

“It’s a truth not well known that the work of the Child Maintenance Service lifts hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty by making sure payments are made and received.”

Indeed, it is estimated that one in five single-parent families on benefits is lifted out of poverty by maintenance payments. That means that the redeployment of CMS staff to the processing of universal credit claims should not be seen as simply moving people from back-office functions to frontline services. I am sure the Minister will agree that ensuring that those obligations are met, and that parents who care receive the support to which they are entitled, is not a service that can be paused without immediate consequences for family incomes, especially at a time when, in thousands of cases, maintenance obligations are being impacted by sudden changes of circumstances.

The point has been well made by Gingerbread. The decision to run a skeleton service during the initial outbreak of covid-19 led to CMS allowing non-resident parents to reduce or withdraw their financial obligations to their children without any evidence. I therefore ask the Minister what assessment the Department has made of the impact of the pandemic on maintenance entitlements, and of the risk of paying parents evading their responsibilities due to the changes in evidence requirements.

This is a matter of priorities and also of resilience. Yes, the pandemic has required us to reprioritise in all sorts of ways, but the impact on services also depends on how resilient they were in the first place. If we cut services to the bone, we will be faced with even harder choices when the unexpected strikes. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that the CMS was already struggling to carry out its functions before the pandemic.

According to the National Audit Office, in 2011-12 the Department for Work and Pensions employed 100,250 people on a full-time equivalent basis. By the time the pandemic struck, the Government had cut DWP staff numbers by 28% to 72,186. The Government now find themselves scrambling to reverse the cuts to staff numbers that they made over the past 10 years, with 7,000 new recruits between April and August and a further 17,000 planned by March.

Child maintenance was not spared when the Government were cutting staff numbers. According to the Department’s workforce management statistics, in 2010-11 there were 8,246 full-time equivalent staff employed in child maintenance and enforcement. In February 2020, there were just 4,745. Nearly a third of those staff were then redeployed to manage the surge in universal credit claims. So by the time the pandemic struck the CMS was already trying to fulfil its mission with little more than half the staff complement in place 10 years earlier.

How well was the CMS performing? For collect and pay arrangements, despite the range of collection and enforcement powers available, compliance was only 68%, and the bar for compliance in the official statistics seems to be set pretty low, defined as paying some child maintenance over the previous three months. I recognise that the performance data show improvements in compliance since 2015, but these are improvements on a very poor baseline. Meanwhile, for direct pay arrangements, more than two thirds of caseload compliance is not even monitored by the Department. Research commissioned in 2016 showed that just under half of caring parents had an effective arrangement after three months, and this rose to only 53% after 13 months.

Ironically, the pandemic has led to an increase in compliance with collect and pay arrangements, but only because so many paying parents are now on benefits, making it easier for the CMS to deduct payment. It is striking and sobering to note that the percentage of collect and pay arrangements where the paying partner is on benefits rose from 21% to 40% from the start of the pandemic to September 2020.

I fully recognise that some of the impact of the pandemic has been unavoidable. It was inevitable that much enforcement activity would have to be paused given that courts were closed, but the pandemic does not explain why DWP staffing levels had been cut so much over the previous 10 years or why the performance of the CMS has for so long left much to be desired. Decisions taken years earlier made managing the impact of the pandemic harder than it needed to be both for the Department and for parents bringing up and looking after their children.