Reforming the Child Maintenance Service (Public Services Committee Report)

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, for her leadership in what was an important and complex inquiry. I also thank her for what she said just now, which I found a forensic analysis of the operation of the Child Maintenance Service. I thank all the staff for their support to the committee. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, too, for her suggestion—for it was her suggestion—that we should undertake this inquiry when she was a member of the Public Services Committee.

I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, for bringing her experience as a Minister to the Select Committee’s work, and for her important suggestions to improve outcomes for children. As she just said, it is about how much money is getting to the child. Getting money to kids who need it is a means to alleviate some child poverty.

I thank the staff of the Child Maintenance Service for the information that they provided and the explanation, from their perspective, of issues that we raised. I particularly thank them for their welcome when we visited the service in Hastings.

My conclusion, in view of the Minister’s response letter that we were sent in March, is that this committee’s work is not complete. I hope that, when we hear from her later, she will reassure us that progress will be made on our recommendations.

I agree with all the conclusions from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. As she said, it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that the system does not work well for many people. For some families, the system is a 100% failure, as she said. I was surprised to find how slow and inadequate enforcement is; it is simply not strong enough. As the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, just reminded us, too many children—220,000—are not getting a single penny. The Government run this service with 3,500 staff; as 220,000 children do not get a single penny, it seems a failure. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, also reminded us, there is a big issue with communications—particularly, from my perspective, communications with those trying to use the system.

The inquiry sat for several months and reported in October last year. About half way through, I recall beginning to think about who was actually in charge of the Child Maintenance Service—the Minister, the department more broadly or the Child Maintenance Service itself. Indeed, I have now begun to wonder whether decisions are now being made elsewhere in Whitehall and not by the Minister and her department at all. I think this matters, but I cannot interpret what I have just said because the Minister’s letter of 6 March accepts that changes are needed but gives no indication of what the Government are going to do or when they are going to do it.

Primary legislation will be needed to remove direct pay and transfer those cases to collect and pay. That is the Government’s intention, but I cannot see—as the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, just pointed out—how such a transfer can be achieved at no cost, but that is what we have been told. I think the case has been made that direct pay should be retained for those who prefer it. Apparently, administrative liability orders will be legislated for as soon as possible. Of course they should, but that was true months ago. What is the plan for when the orders will be legislated for? The Minister may make a set of announcements when she speaks later.

As we took evidence, I grew more concerned by the performance of telephony services. We said in paragraph 24 of our conclusions and recommendations:

“It is unacceptable that parents still face an average 18-minute waiting time to speak to the CMS on the phone, with tens of thousands of callers waiting over an hour and over 500,000 calls being abandoned in the last year alone”.


I am reaching the conclusion that the CMS wants to run a digital service and reduce telephony, even though telephony enables a problem to be ironed out immediately through synchronous discussion. I hope the Minister will reassure us that the telephony systems will be improved, because they can be more efficient.

I also concluded that the service is very slow to change in both reaching decisions and then implementing them. The consultation on the child maintenance calculation, about which we heard further earlier this afternoon, needs to be very clear as to what its objective is. We also need a much stronger definition of non-compliance in collect and pay, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, said.

I found the Minister’s response on key performance indicators, in her letter at the beginning of March, disappointing. The response to question 7, which asked why the DWP would not publish the number or proportion of calls facing excessive wait times despite holding the data, said that all developments to official statistics are progressed through the statistical work programme. When are performance indicators official statistics? If the information on key performance indicators is there, it should be made publicly available. They exist but they are, I regret to say, hidden from public gaze; I do not understand why that should be.

When Select Committees take evidence, one of the most valuable things they can do is listen to the recipients of a service. It is not enough to listen only to those providing the service. We held two engagement events, one with receiving parents and another with paying parents. Let me read out the key words in our report on bias:

“Almost all receiving parents believed the system was biased towards paying parents, allowing them to reduce their payments or evade altogether due to the lack, and timeliness, of enforcement and the loopholes in calculations”.


However, when I listened to paying parents, they said the opposite. As the report states:

“Almost all parents believed that the Child Maintenance system, its processes and the underlying legislation was biased against the paying parent, and in favour of the receiving parent”.


There are two ways of looking at those two different facts. One is to say, “If both the receiving and paying parents are unhappy, that probably means the Government have got it just about right”. However, the opposite is what I believe to be true: both the receiving and paying parents are right, and what they are talking about is their own personal experience of the operation of the service.

I hope that the Minister has read the summary notes in our report on our engagement events with both paying and receiving parents—I am sure she has—because I found them very instructive. One thing that was asked for was a shared narrative. Receiving parents were fed up with having to re-explain the circumstances of their case each time they rang up because a different person was receiving their call. That person would then get some information on a screen, but it would not be available to the person who had made the call. One thing I hope the Government will look at is creating a shared narrative on a screen that both participants in a call can read. I understand the difficulties around this being private information held by the Child Maintenance Service but, equally, it is very important that the receiving parent who wishes to raise an issue can be confident that the information they are talking about is available to the person with whom they are speaking.

In conclusion, it is true that in many cases the Child Maintenance Service works well, in particular in straightforward cases. Reforming the calculation formula has become a very urgent matter, and so has speeding up enforcement. I have the highest regard for the CMS’s 3,500 highly committed staff. They are in the front line of reducing child poverty, and over 1 million children depend on the system working to keep them out of poverty. Yet 100,000 children miss out on maintenance payments every quarter, and around one-third of separated families have no child maintenance arrangement at all. So I conclude that this is work in progress. I just wish that action to effect change could be speedier.