Reforming the Child Maintenance Service (Public Services Committee Report)

Baroness Coffey Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, it was a pleasure to be on the committee formulating this report. We were led ably by our chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, and it was a pleasure to work with the other members of the committee. I should pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott. She was on the committee but had to come off it because of her Front-Bench role. She had initially encouraged the committee to look into this, and I am glad that we did.

I will not pretend otherwise; I used to be Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. I was there for three years. Aspects of the Child Maintenance Service were a key part, for me, of how we reduce poverty. I think in that I am united, not only with the committee but the Government, in seeing this as a way to try to reduce child poverty.

However, I am concerned that, in the response to very well-thought through recommendations and challenges to the Government, there were a series of missed opportunities. There are missed opportunities by the Government to do exactly what they say they want to do. It is “Mañana, mañana”, when we have not got some of the legislation we need. For example, I understand that, with an administrative liability order, there is probably still a problem with Scotland. But why do the Government not just get on and deal with the appropriate legislation for England and Wales while they tackle the issue in Scotland? There is no difficulty or constraint on trying to do one set of regulations tackling England and Wales and one for Scotland.

The issue about domestic abuse continues, with the commencement of another piece of legislation. I say to noble Lords that I have learned from that in a different way. For every Private Member’s Bill that I have been involved in or advised others on, I have always advised them to put an automatic commencement date in, because these Acts of Parliament were not put into effect. Again, I am concerned by the Government’s response. I recognise the work they are trying to do in tackling violence against women and girls, and the strategy there. But it feels as though they are saying, “This is too difficult” or “No, we can’t really do this”, despite it coming from a government Bill handed to a Back-Bencher in the previous Parliament.

Elsewhere in the responses we have seen that DWP civil servants are actively trained on domestic abuse and therefore can address it in a particular way, or, as I will come to shortly, removing every claim to collect and pay will solve this problem. We have not seen any legislation for that yet. I do not know whether the Government intend to bring that forward in this parliamentary Session. It certainly was not in the King’s Speech, but we know that it can happen regardless. It is worth tackling now, as indeed are some of the other measures, where the opportunity is there to act rather than wait, with—dare I say—the perfect being the enemy of the good, particularly when it comes to the children to whom my noble friends referred.

Going back to some of the issues that we have, one thing surprised me. When I was Secretary of State, I asked for a focus on people who are not working and to make them a priority for targeting by work coaches—to help these young people get into work. The reason that matters is that if you are on benefits, in essence, you will either pay nothing or you will pay £7 per week, deducted from your benefits. That is all. With collect and pay, 38% of the people on it end up with a deduction from benefits. You would like to think we would even get £7 per week through that, yet we know that the number of children catered for through direct pay is about 60%. About 40% are through collect and pay. Yet 220,000 children get zilch—not a single penny—through the collect and pay approach. That is based on the figures for the end of 2024, because that is what was available when we were formulating the report. I have not been able to do the same analysis to that extent. I appreciate that when I tabled a Question to the Government, it was considered too much to do that bit of analysis. I accept that some of these things will come out in statistics in due course.

Still, let us think about that: 220,000 children did not get a single penny. I am just reinforcing what my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley was saying—I call her “my noble friend”, because we were friends on the committee, being cross-party in that regard—that that is what we are dealing with. I suggest to the Minister that she should reflect on that and go back and look at prioritising employment support. We know that unemployment is going up. If this is a way of helping young children to get on in life, it is imperative that we help those who are not working at the moment to get into work, if for nothing else than for their children.

There was another missed opportunity with the research that the Government were due to publish last Monday. They were going to release the information that they had and then it came out on Friday. I have only had a chance to skim-read the 117-page document, but I was surprised by the questions that were asked. There is nothing surprising about the tensions between two parents. It was no surprise to me or, I expect, to members of the committee or indeed other noble Lords that the wealthiest people are the ones who seem to resent handing over quite a lot of their money. Meanwhile, those on the lowest incomes would have been quite happy to see more but did not necessarily expect people to be able to pay more because they knew the circumstances of the father—it is usually the father, I think 86% of the time—or mother of their child.

I was surprised that we did not get into other bits of research about changing the formula or the calculation. Indeed, I was disappointed by the rejection of the court approach of trying to work out a formula. The key thing about our recommendation about the court approach was that everything is put on the table. The big arguments that happen between parents are about the other person lying: “They’re hiding stuff”, “They’re hiding money”, “I know he’s got these things”, or even, “I know he’s increased his pension contributions deliberately to reduce his income so he doesn’t have to hand over money”. It is normally about the argument between the parents, while the child is the one who suffers.

I thought that the beauty of the court approach was that basically people have to put their assets on the table. You would like to think that there could be much more use of, as my noble friend referred to, a lot more of the HMRC data that we have today. Indeed, I hope that we will start to be able to use some of the powers that are there to try to understand where people are simply doing whatever they can because their—let us put it this way—loathing of the other parent is causing detriment. In that regard, my understanding is that the Government are not going to change the formula at all, although they may well move the variation where, if your income changes by more than 25%, the calculation is redone and will reduce that to 15%. Okay, that is fine, but it is another missed opportunity for comprehensive research and to look afresh at some of the key issues that cause division.

That brings me to the whole policy that the Government are continuing to press on with. We have not seen the legislation but it is about switching off direct pay. This is where the Government basically help with the calculation of what should be exchanged between two parents, as opposed to collect and pay, where money comes into DWP and then gets handed out with a difference in charge. I am sure that the Minister has looked at the recent survey of separated parents, which shows that a pretty high proportion of parents had arrangements—probably higher than shown in the statistics or in other assessments that the Government have done, particularly in the analysis of what the benefit would be from reducing the number of children in poverty as a consequence of these changes, which, frankly, is very low, given the big hurrah that has accompanied this.

It is worth looking at that in more detail, recognising that there are higher figures for what gets paid over than the Government may think from some of their other surveys. We should also recognise, in other research that the Government have published very recently, how the majority of parents believe that having this formula, or the approach of being able to use the Child Maintenance Service, is important to get some kind of enforcement without the need for all the other things that we are referring to, whether that is removing passports or going to prison, both of which happen exceptionally rarely.

One of the reasons given by the Government for moving away from direct pay is that it was a failure of direct pay that the numbers on direct pay have gone up, and the whole point of direct pay was that at some point people would come off the need for it. That does not seem very logical to me. In the results at the end of December 2019, there were about half a million families in this arrangement overall, both CP and DP, and there are about 780,000 in the latest statistics. It shows there is a clear appetite for wanting to use this process in order to try to make sure there is a clear way to get money to a child. I found it odd that, while the Government accept the recommendation that we should advertise this more, the very fact that parents use it was seen as a policy failure, because they were on direct pay and had not decided on a different sort of arrangement that did not involve the Child Maintenance Service.

I feel strongly about this, and I know the Minister knows that, because it comes down to money—it comes down to how much money is going to the child. We continue to see in the amount of debt that is left over that a considerably higher percentage of what was due to be collected is happening through the collect and pay service. We are seeing the compliance rates much higher on direct pay, even on the survey that was done a few years ago, where 60% was full compliance—full compliance, not over 90% of the 46%, but full compliance—through direct pay. I remember my argument with the officials at the time, and my noble friends were in the room. I am pointing to my noble friend Lady Shawcross-Wolfson, who was a non-executive director of DWP at the time, and my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott. My argument was, where we had something like 300,000 children who are getting all the money that they are supposed to have, why would you kill off that process just to get them into a system where somebody has to hand over money to the Government to then pass it back?

I come to my final point, because I appreciate that the Minister and I will not necessarily agree on that, but I hope that she looks at this again genuinely for the sake of the children. In terms of some of the other recommendations, I think that it would be useful to see more on the family hubs. It was good to see from the MoJ that the use of the £500 mediation voucher has significantly increased. That is encouraging because, ultimately, we want to try to reduce conflict. In terms of thinking through some of the digital communication, I was slightly surprised that there did not seem to be a simple way to have a more proactive IT system. I am conscious that changing IT is always challenging. I was thinking in particular of paragraph 32 in the list of recommendations and conclusions.

Ahead of any legislation, I hope that the Government will accept the recommendation to publish an evaluation of the impact of moving all cases on to collect and pay. I am afraid that I just do not accept the comment that it will not cost any more money. It is physically impossible to see how that could be the case, or illogical, from my perspective. As I say, there will be missed opportunities for many children in this country. I know that that is not the outcome that the Government are seeking, but I hope that the Minister looks again at some of the recommendations from our committee and really makes a difference to the opportunities for children who, quite frankly, are some of the most deprived in our country.