Child Maintenance Services

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I express my sincere thanks to the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) for securing today’s debate and for setting up the child maintenance services APPG. Two of my constituents, Laura and Nicola, attended a meeting of the APPG this morning to share their experiences of the Child Maintenance Service, and that has done a great deal to make them feel that finally their voices are being heard.

Back in May, the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) led a debate here in Westminster Hall on this very topic, and in that debate I spoke about some of the long-running difficulties that my constituents had been having in getting the payments that they were owed by the paying parent in their cases. “Disappointing” is not a strong enough word for how it feels to be here seven months on, knowing that those constituents have yet to see any meaningful changes in their cases.

It is hard for me and my team when we see a new CMS case cross our desk. We know that constituents expect us to be able to do something to sort the problem out for them. We have the same expectations of ourselves. But we also know that there will be months of back and forth and most likely very little to show for it at the end. That is not because we—both Members and our staff—are not trying hard enough, and I am sure that it is not because the staff at the CMS do not have sympathy or want to help. It is because the system is not fit for purpose. Reforming it for the benefit of the service users must be an urgent priority for Ministers.

I know that some headway is being made. I welcome Dr Samantha Callan’s report today on the CMS response to domestic abuse, for example. I also welcome the response to that report from the new Minister on this matter, which reflects support for changes that many CMS users and their elected representatives have been calling for.

[Jamie Stone]

I am very glad that the hon. Member has made a point of drawing a line between the best efforts of the CMS staff, and the system. I want to place it on the record that my own office has no problem with the people on the other end of the email or the telephone. I do not want that to be misunderstood.

[Margaret Ferrier]

I thank the hon. Member for making that point; it is exactly what I was meaning. It is not incumbent on the CMS staff to sort out every single problem, but they need to be given the tools to be able to help us as parliamentarians and to help, ultimately, our constituents.

The report today by Dr Samantha Callan is a long report, and I admit that I have not yet had an opportunity to review it in full, but I am pleased that long-running issues are finally being reviewed and addressed. Dr Callan’s report rightly highlights the fact that the space in which the CMS operates is unusual and tricky and that, as she puts it,

“The CMS is a state agency that is tasked with intervening in an area of social life—parental separation—that is often highly emotionally charged, where people are not always able to act rationally, and where contact with both parties is required in order to get money flowing for the benefit of children.”

She also highlights the fact that the CMS’s remit is to administer the scheme, but it does not have a statutory safeguarding responsibility or duty of care.

One of the key recommendations that Dr Callan’s report has made, and Ministers have accepted, alongside others, is to allow receiving parents who are survivors of domestic abuse to access the collect and pay service without the consent of the paying parent. The reasons behind that are clear and it is welcome that they are being recognised through changes to the system.

I have heard deeply upsetting stories of paying parents using the direct pay system—where they pay maintenance into the receiving parent’s bank account—to continue to control and abuse their ex-partner. There are stories of payments being split into small chunks, with abusive messages left in the payment reference box as a means to continue the abuse. It is correct that that has changed, but I think that the change could and should be applied more broadly. Where paying parents refuse to keep up with payments via direct pay, receiving parents should be able to request use of the collect and pay method and to feel reassurance that their request will be granted.

In fact, that was the request my constituent Nicola made to the CMS, which refused. She is no longer in contact with the paying parent, but she has been told on various occasions that she would need to go away and gather information on his earnings or her daughter’s entitlement. She is not the only one of my constituents to be told that. She says she is made to feel like a neurotic, money-grabbing woman every time she complains about the system.

Another constituent, Laura, has explained that her mental wellbeing and self-esteem have taken a real knock from the ongoing back and forth with the service. Imagine someone being made to feel in the wrong for fighting for the money they are entitled to in order to meet the basic costs of raising a child. As it stands, it is far too easy for paying parents to avoid payments, under-declare their income and hide income streams. That is a key aspect of almost every case involving CMS that comes to my team.

Constituents report that they are even advised by the CMS to subsidise their income—essentially to claim benefits—if the paying parent does not keep up with their financial obligations. That entirely defeats the original intention behind the reform of the Child Support Agency into the Child Maintenance Service that we have today, which was to remove the state’s financial burden and its involvement in child support arrangements as far as possible.

If Government Departments and agencies addressed the issues head on and communicated with each other, a lot of the pressure caused by this avoidance by paying parents could be quickly eased. We know—this point is crucial—that communication between the child welfare scheme, DWP and HMRC is frankly not good enough. We also know that there are reasons for that, such as the regulations around information sharing and how intelligence is acted on. But what I do not understand is why the Government have not brought forward measures to fix things much sooner.

Women and children are victimised again and again by this outdated, underperforming system. I understand that both men and women can be, and are, victims of domestic violence and economic abuse., and we heard about that this morning at the APPG. That said, the gender aspect of this problem cannot be ignored, and it stems from historic and deeply held misogyny in society’s subconscious.

We have children literally ageing out of the system, without seeing a fraction of the money they are entitled to to enable them to have a normal, comfortable childhood. It is clear that the current system does not work, if it ever has. My constituents and their children need more. They need a commitment from Ministers that the Government will really get into the detail of the failings of the CMS. They need a commitment from Ministers that they will be offered the right support and that the communication between Departments will be addressed and improved. They need a commitment that this will be done urgently. I hope the Minister is in a position to provide those commitments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Marion Fellows]

I have papers in front of me from a case in my constituency. The parents have separated, and the father was going through court to try to get residency for his daughter. His daughter has now left school, and his ex-partner is still claiming child benefit, which is an abuse of the social security system. His daughter has now left home, is impoverished and has no contact with her father. He sees this as a failure of the state to help bring up his daughter properly. He has been paying, but he has now tried to walk away from the court case because he cannot afford to continue. It also would have meant that his ex-partner ended up in prison. It is a terrible case. I did say I would not get involved and get too emotional, but it is difficult to listen to what happens to children because of failures in the CMS.

A Joseph Rowntree Foundation report from 2020 found that nearly half of children in lone-parent families are in poverty. This has to stop. Satwat Rehman, the chief executive of One Parent Families Scotland, said:

“parents are facing huge delays in hearing back, poor customer service, and ultimately a failure to collect payments”

at

“a time when the cost of living is rising to impossible levels”.

Victoria Benson, chief executive of Gingerbread, said:

“Child maintenance is not a ‘nice to have’ luxury, in many cases it makes the difference between a family keeping their heads above water or plunging into poverty.”

Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts said:

“Providing for your children is a fundamental responsibility, and it’s genuinely surprising that the Child Maintenance Service allows so many adults to evade it. Children from these families deserve better than to be treated as collateral damage when relationships break down.”

The Scottish Government do all they can to mitigate child poverty. The child payment fund in Scotland, which has been quadrupled recently, is a good start, but it is still not enough. The real issue is that the CMS isnae working. That is it in a nutshell. Parents spend hours on the phone—either the paying parent or the parent with care—and they do not get the same person on every call. They get conflicting advice, they end up in tears and they end up wasting their entire weekend with worry, as Members have said. It is not good enough.

[Margaret Ferrier]

Looking back to the contribution from one of my constituents at the APPG this morning, the problem is not just the communication between the CMS and the constituent, but the fact that constituents are told they will get a call back. On several occasions that has not happened. Does the hon. Member agree that that adds to the poor mental wellbeing of those parents?