Child Maintenance Service

Tom Gordon Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Andrew Western)]

Let me begin by congratulating the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom) on securing this debate, which is incredibly important to him and his constituents. I hope that I will assure him in my contribution that it is important to the Government too.

Far too many children are growing up in poverty. A key priority for this Labour Government is to reduce that number as soon as possible. That is why child maintenance is incredibly important. It is estimated that child maintenance payments keep around 160,000 children out of poverty each year. That has involved the CMS arranging around £1.4 billion in child maintenance payments in the 12 months to September 2024.

Tackling child poverty is an urgent priority for the Government, which is why we have already announced our commitment to triple investment in breakfast clubs to over £30 million, to roll out free breakfast clubs at all primary schools, to create 3,000 additional nurseries and to increase the national living wage to £12.21 an hour from April to boost the pay of 3 million workers, many of them parents.

The ministerial child poverty taskforce, to which the hon. Gentleman referred, is working to publish a child poverty strategy later this year, which will deliver lasting change. In developing the strategy, the taskforce is exploring all available levers for reducing child poverty across four key themes: increasing incomes, reducing essential costs, increasing financial resilience and better local support, especially in the early years.

[Tom Gordon (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (LD)]

The Minister mentioned that the taskforce would look at all options. Would that include scrapping the two-child benefit cap?

[Andrew Western]

The hon. Member will have heard me say that we are looking at all available levers across those four areas. We rule nothing in and nothing out, but I understand his point.

We are aware of the challenges that the CMS faces and recognise that there is scope for improvement. The ministerial team as a whole is committed to making those improvements. On what we are doing about those issues, I will turn to the recent direct pay consultation, which the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire referred to, and offer some background to the proposed reforms. My party has long called for reforms to the direct pay service, stating that it does not work for all parents. For that reason, this Government extended the direct pay consultation launched by the previous Government, with the express purpose of gathering as much feedback from stakeholders as possible. We are looking closely at the feedback received and will publish the Government response in due course. I appreciate that the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire would ask for a more specific timeline, but I hope he will appreciate that in what is an incredibly delicate area—dealing with vulnerable children, vulnerable families and strained relationships—we want to take our time and ensure that we get the changes right.