Child Maintenance Service: Payment Recovery from Absent Parents

Martyn Day Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the performance of the Child Maintenance Service in recovering payments from absent parents.

I would hope that everyone agrees that parents should continue to take financial responsibility for their children after the break-up of a relationship. We must understand that relationship break-up can often be a disturbing and distressing time for everybody, often leaving behind a great deal of bad feeling. It is not easy in such circumstances to come to an arrangement that is fair on both partners and, most of all, fair on the children. The criticisms that I will be directing today at the Child Maintenance Service, and its predecessor the Child Support Agency, should not be taken as an indication that I do not appreciate the difficult circumstances in which it has to operate.

Many absent parents do their best to care for their children, and I do not want to give the impression that everybody whose relationship has broken up is trying to avoid their responsibilities. Sadly, however, some people see the break-up of a relationship as an opportunity to abandon all responsibilities for their children. The Child Maintenance Service owes it to those children and to the resident parent to ensure that the absent parent complies with their legal and moral responsibilities. We are not talking about forcing somebody to pay to give their children a life of luxury. Indeed, we are often talking about forcing somebody to pay money that they can well afford in order to keep their own children out of poverty. The Child Maintenance Service is sometimes not good enough at getting money from people who can afford it, and we sometimes see it pursuing people for payments that they quite clearly cannot afford.

I am grateful to several organisations that have provided me with background information not only for this debate, but to support my caseworkers in dealing with a significant number of requests for help from constituents. Fife Gingerbread does an enormous amount of good work in my constituency and elsewhere in Fife. My caseworkers also find the Child Poverty Action Group’s child support handbook indispensable, and that will be the same in every constituency across these islands.

Several individuals have also shared their experiences with me. I do not have time to go into any of them in great detail, and some of cannot be aired in public for reasons of confidentiality. In addition, some of the issues that have been raised—serious though they are—do not really fall within the remit of this debate because they relate, for example, to the regulations around exactly how somebody’s income is determined, which causes a great deal of anger, sometimes among the paying parents and sometimes for the receiving parents. I make that point because it will not be possible to go into most of these cases in any kind of detail in the time available. I have also been approached by several colleagues who want to speak in the debate or to intervene, so I want to give time for that as well.

I see too many cases in which it is obvious that a parent is determined to avoid their responsibilities and that they can get away with it—sometimes for years at a time—which is just not good enough. It is far too easy, for example, to hide income from the Child Maintenance Service, which too often leaves it to the resident parent to produce the evidence that their ex-partner is effectively committing fraud. That is bad enough at the best of times, but if the resident parent has been the victim of domestic abuse or financially coercive and controlling behaviour, it is wholly unacceptable to make them responsible for ensuring that the other parent of their children complies with their legal responsibilities.

[Martyn Day (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech on an issue that I have raised in the past. Several constituents who are the resident parent have not received any money for years, and a common theme or trend seems to be that the paying parent claims to have given up paid work or become self-employed in order to hide their income. That totally thwarts the whole purpose of the Child Maintenance Service. Does my hon. Friend agree that the CMS must pull out all the stops to find a way to prevent that from happening, maintain its charter commitment and ensure that the child is at the heart of everything?

[Peter Grant]

Absolutely. I do not think we will ever have a set of regulations that everyone agrees with. If a relationship between two people has completely broken down, the one who is paying will think they are paying too much, and the one who is receiving payment will think they are not getting enough. Surely, if the rules are based on someone’s income, however, it should be no easier for them to hide their income from their children than it is to hide it from the Inland Revenue.

I have assisted constituents affected by HMRC loan charge, as well as a constituent who was pursued to a ridiculous degree for a relatively small debt that they turned out not to owe to HMRC. Many resident parents in my constituency would like a fraction of that diligence to be used by the CMS when it chases down money that is owed not to the Government but to children who often desperately need it.