Child Maintenance Service

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

Tuesday 18th April 2017 Westminster Hall

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) for securing this important debate. It is right that parents who are separated or divorced fulfil their obligations to their children and provide financial support. As the hon. Lady mentioned in her opening speech, child maintenance is financial support for a child’s everyday living costs paid by one parent to another once they have separated. It is a vital source of income for separated families.

The Child Maintenance Service is meant to work by assessing a paying parent’s ability to pay, calculating the amount due and, if necessary, collecting and enforcing payment. However, the system has a number of failings—they have been outlined clearly today—that are forcing more and more children into poverty. Gingerbread, which supports single-parent families, maintains that the Government’s one-size-fits-all approach is placing support for children from separated families at real risk. There is real concern that the CMS, which was brought into effect in 2012, prioritises administrative convenience over the interests of children.

Three charges were introduced: a £20 application fee, enforcement charges for non-payment, and a collect and pay fee for those who ask the service to administer the payments. That is putting off parents who cannot afford the fee from claiming the financial support that their children are entitled to. Under collect and pay, parents must hand over 20% on top of their usual child maintenance amount—we have heard enough about that already this morning. The unfair charges will disproportionately impact survivors of domestic abuse who are unable to have a family-based arrangement and feel that they have no option but to use the service, as they are too frightened to have a direct link to their abuser.

I echo the concerns of previous speakers. The hon. Member for Eddisbury (Antoinette Sandbach) made an excellent contribution using her personal and professional experience. She clearly outlined many of the problems. The charges are a cruel and callous tax on child support. Ultimately, it is the children who will lose out on money intended to support them. Crucially, the application fee can be waived for domestic violence victims—around a third of applicants are given the exemption—but no such exemption exists for the collection service.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the CMS is yet to deliver the modern, fit-for-purpose service intended by the transition from the Child Support Agency system. That system was replaced by the CMS because it was riddled with failings, such as mistakes being made during the assessment process and poor performance. However, the CMS is performing just as poorly, due in part to poor case management and the lack of information and training for staff supplying the service and the lack of information for parents. Those things continue to hamper the CMS’s performance.

Parents on the previous child maintenance schemes are only being invited by the Government to apply to the 2012 scheme—transfer is not automatic. Can the Minister explain why the transfer is not automatic? Recent figures suggest a backlog of £4 billion in uncollected child maintenance payments. Does she agree that that is completely unacceptable? I am sure she does. Can she outline what steps the Government are taking to deal with the backlog?

The money is owed by non-resident parents and has built up over 23 years. Figures show that some 1.2 million resident parents are owed child maintenance. The vast majority of unpaid child maintenance money was accumulated under the CSA scheme, but a further £93 million has already built up under the new CMS system. The Government have failed to increase the incentive for non-resident parents to take responsibility for their children, reducing their children’s incomes as a consequence. Will the Minister outline how exactly the Government are actively pursuing unpaid child maintenance? Will they provide compensation to the families who have been left waiting for their unpaid maintenance?

The National Audit Office said that as of September 2016, there were more than 1.1 million cases of arrears. Although the majority related to the CSA scheme, more than 96,000 were from the new CMS scheme. Since the introduction of the new scheme, the NAO has said that the Department had reduced the number of enforcement actions it is taking. The Government have stated that they are offering parents a fresh start by suggesting that they write off debts to which their children are legally entitled. These are some of the poorest children in society, suffering from incompetence and cuts in enforcement workers and enforcement work. Why do the Government not restore staffing levels, step up enforcement and ensure that the new Child Maintenance Service is obliged to collect outstanding debts?

Child maintenance can make a huge practical difference for single parents. It can help pay fuel bills, buy clothes for children or fund school trips. It can put food in their mouths and clothes on their backs. For particularly financially vulnerable families, including single-parent families on benefits, it can also be the difference between children growing up in poverty or not. The risk of poverty for children in single-parent households is nearly twice that for children in two-parent households. That is particularly important considering that under this Government, 4 million of our children in the UK now live in poverty. Child maintenance alone lifts a fifth of low-income single-parent families out of poverty. When social security is being cut and child poverty is predicted to dramatically increase, it is more important than ever that children do not miss out on such vital financial support. Can the Minister please outline what steps the Government are taking to tackle the increasing levels of child poverty?

One in four families in Britain is a single-parent family, and 1.5 million families rely on Government-run schemes to ensure they get the right child maintenance payments. When child maintenance goes unpaid by a parent, it is our children who lose out. Increasing the barriers to statutory support is an ill-advised move if the Government intend for more children to benefit from maintenance arrangements. I urge the Government to do more to make sure that vulnerable families and children do not lose out from the changes, but benefit from them.