Child Maintenance Service: Payment Recovery from Absent Parents

Mike Amesbury Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. I congratulate the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) on bringing the debate to Westminster Hall today, as well as the 13 Members who have contributed. When I spoke in this place a few months ago, I made the point that child maintenance does not exist in isolation. It provides essential help with the costs of raising a child—food, clothing and travel expenses. It can make a huge difference, as hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber have pointed out, to the welfare of the child and their start in life, which is crucial. Whatever the administrative challenges, and whatever the technicalities of the child maintenance system, it is important to remember that children are centre stage, as the hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr) eloquently argued.

It is crucial that children—it is often the most vulnerable—should have access to the financial support that every one of them deserves. It is equally crucial that the system should function in their favour when that support is withheld without good reason. Research shows that child maintenance alone lifts a fifth of low-income one-parent families out of poverty. We must remember that lone-parent families are particularly vulnerable to poverty. One in four lone parents is in persistent poverty—twice as many as in any other group, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The inadequacy of social security arguably makes child maintenance even more vital as a source of income for struggling single parents. However, as we have heard from across the Chamber, it is fair to say that there is a considerable distance to go to ensure that the current system of child maintenance achieves its aim.

A recent report from the charity Gingerbread has shown major problems with the payment of child maintenance through the direct pay system, for example. The Government could and should take action to assess the accuracy of the concerns. The current situation, whereby the DWP does not even track whether payments have been made, means that it cannot report on compliance in two thirds of cases. On collect and pay, Gingerbread has consistently argued that there is no evidence that charges encourage collaboration between parents. In the second quarter of 2019, 33% of paying parents in the collect-and-pay service built up arrears owing to non-compliance. The DWP’s own figures reveal that that is nearly £19 million. Furthermore, there remain continuing problems such as those highlighted today with inconsistent casework handing and follow-up—no follow-up at all in many cases—as well as poor and non-existent communication.

In my own constituency case load, as with other hon. Members, concerns have been raised time and again, and constituents believe that they will never get any money because it is tucked away through creative accounting. Like many in the Chamber, I firmly believe that collecting unpaid child maintenance should be a priority for any Government, and that the considerable toolbox of enforcement measures—many, in all fairness, the result of the 2018 review—should be applied more consistently. There has been a significant fall in enforcement activity by the DWP to recover payments that are, by definition, owed to children. According to Gingerbread:

“The hands-off approach, compounded by poor administration, places the burden of responsibility for pushing for Direct Pay enforcement onto receiving parents”.

Where direct pay arrangements break down and arrears accumulate, the CMS can assist by moving the arrangement on to collect and pay, but to use the service paying parents are charged 20% of the child maintenance plus a £20 registration fee, and receiving parents pay 4%. That introduces additional costs for already financially stretched households. Even on collect and pay, only 67% are paying something—I stress that word “something”—towards what they owe. Indeed, some of the testimonials that have been heard in the Chamber today make it abundantly clear that the current system needs to be more robust, and that the leadership of the DWP should listen and take more robust action. This is not simply a question of processes and systems; relationships and emotions are at the heart of how this approach affects those who use it.

Having listened to the debate, I have a number of questions to ask the Minister. Will he introduce monitoring of direct pay compliance, so we can have a clear picture of its effectiveness? Will he commit to introducing improved and more transparent service standards around enforcement and late payments? Will he review the effectiveness of collect-and-pay charges for receiving parents and look at the provisions that relate to the Domestic Abuse Bill around coercive relationships?