Child Maintenance Services

Karen Buck Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2023 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to respond to the debate under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) on securing the debate, on his work on the APPG and on a powerful opening speech.

The contributions that we have heard this afternoon draw on the casework that Members of Parliament have brought to them, many of which are deeply harrowing and very powerful, and reinforce a point made several times: we do not want to be here debating the failure of the system. We want to be able to concentrate on other topics, knowing that the management of this policy area has been brought under control once and for all.

The debate is timely: the highly critical report by the National Audit Office on child maintenance was published last March and we will be closely studying the Government response to the review of the Child Maintenance Service response to domestic abuse, which has been published today. There are also two private Members’ Bills on aspects of the service going through Parliament at the moment.

Child maintenance may no longer attract the almost entirely negative headlines that it attracted a couple of decades ago, but, as we have heard, it concerns 2.4 million separated families with 3.5 million children, only half of whom have in place an effective management maintenance arrangement, where any maintenance at all is being paid. That figure is effectively unchanged since 2011-12.

We know that maintenance payments are important in reducing child poverty. It has been estimated that one in five single parents on benefits is lifted out of poverty by maintenance payments—a figure that can and should be a great deal higher. For hundreds of thousands of families, the system is failing to ensure that maintenance is paid or paid in full. Remarkably, the National Audit Office says

“it receives more correspondence on child maintenance than any other single issue.”

In addition, the DWP receives more complaints on child maintenance than on any other subject.

Ideally, we would all prefer not to need an agency such as the Child Maintenance Service, or to need it a great deal less than we do. We would prefer that the overwhelming majority of separated families had voluntary arrangements in place, where the separated parent fully met their responsibilities to their family, so that it was unnecessary for the state to intervene. However, we do not live in such a world and we cannot bring it about just by wishing it.

There are major problems in the enforcement of maintenance obligations, as we have heard and as I will return to, but it is important to recognise that the issue is not simply one of enforcement of statutory maintenance arrangements, which involve only 18% of separated families; it is no less importantly about the absence of any arrangements whatever. As the NAO has shown, 44% of separated families simply have no maintenance arrangement in place, whether statutory or voluntary, effective or ineffective.

Nobody wants to return to the days of the old Child Support Agency, but the present situation is hugely out of line with the expectations of the DWP when the system was reformed a decade ago. As the NAO has reminded us, back then the Department’s assumption was for voluntary arrangements to rise to 35% of separated families by 2019. That expectation was slightly exceeded, at 38%, which is welcome.

However, the Department also assumed that take-up of the statutory scheme would fall only from 46% to 33%. In the event, that expectation was hugely overshot, with only 18% of families now using the statutory scheme. It was thus a matter of simple arithmetic that the percentage of families with no maintenance arrangements in place at all rose from 25% in 2011 to 44% in 2019-20. Remember, the Government’s stated objective in 2012 was to increase the proportion of separated families with effective maintenance. That objective has simply not been met. There has been no change at all, as the NAO has shown. The explanation lies as much in the low take-up of the statutory scheme as in non-compliance with it. Why did the Government think that the 2012 reforms would increase the number of families with effective maintenance arrangements? The NAO said:

“The Department’s 2011 green paper...set out the need to better integrate support provided to families to help them make family-based arrangements with other services such as those provided to parents going through separation, the family justice system and the then Sure Start system.”

The Government then proceeded to devastate the Sure Start system, cutting provision by more than a third. What steps are DWP Ministers taking to improve take-up of the direct pay and collect and pay options offered by the CMS? The question is not about what might be achieved through unspecified integrated support with other services, but what the Department itself intends to do. How will Ministers ensure that the intention is driven through the Department and how will they ensure accountability in line with the expectations?

None of that is to suggest that enforcement is not an issue; it just should not be used to distract attention away from other failures. There are huge problems in the enforcement of statutory maintenance arrangements. It was understandable that enforcement action was negatively affected by the pandemic. CMS staff were redeployed to manage the surge in universal credit claims. The courts were closed. The number of liability orders in process fell from 6,900 in March 2020 to 2,400 in September 2020. All that was understandable, but since 2020 there has been only the most partial recovery. The figures for June 2022 are not only far lower than they were before the pandemic, at 4,200, but lower than they were in June 2021—by over 1,000 cases. The number of enforcement agency referrals in process is less than half what it was before the pandemic.

We need a child maintenance system that works: with voluntary arrangements where possible, but with statutory arrangements that reach the families who need them and are enforced far more effectively than they are now. Will the Minister set out exactly how the DWP intends to rise to those twin challenges, so that we do not need to come back to this Chamber and once again debate the failures of the Child Maintenance Service?