Covid-19: Child Maintenance Service

Wendy Chamberlain Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) on securing today’s debate, and I was happy to support her application. It is clear from Members’ contributions so far that we all deal with a number of constituents’ cases regarding child maintenance payments. In just a year as an MP, I have dealt with several, so I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss the functioning of the CMS in Parliament today.

It is particularly appropriate to recognise the pressures that have resulted from coronavirus. There are pressures on the hard-working CMS staff, to whom I pay tribute. Like so many of us around the country, they will have had to get used to new ways of working. There are also pressures on parents in receipt of child maintenance, mostly one-parent families, as the economic impact of the pandemic threatens the livelihoods of many. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s excellent “UK Poverty 2020/21” report, published last week, makes that clear. Even before covid, there were huge pressures on one-parent families. They had the highest in-work poverty rate and they are also one of the groups who are most likely to have been especially impacted by covid-19. Single parents are predominantly women and are more likely to work in the sectors hardest hit by covid. They are more reliant on local jobs and are more likely to have struggled with childcare during lockdown. Four in five people in one-parent families are in receipt of income-related benefits.

I mentioned constituency cases and I wanted to highlight one in particular. This constituent contacted me right at the start of my time as an MP, almost exactly a year ago, and her case is shocking. Her former husband had evaded making any financial contribution to help her raise her two sons over an 18-year period and she was owed almost £30,000 of unpaid child maintenance. I am not intending to go into a blow-by-blow account of her dealings with the CMS in the past year. Thankfully, the debt has now been paid, and I am very grateful to Baroness Stedman-Scott for meeting me twice in the autumn to try to resolve the case. However, a few things stood out to me, and to my constituent, throughout this process that I wanted to draw attention to.

The first was the sense of drift. I went to the CMS on several occasions asking what its next steps were and responses were forthcoming to me only after some chasing—my constituent had a similar experience. Months seemed to pass where very little progress was made, and just when we thought that the whole thing had been resolved it turned out that the old liability orders issued against her ex-husband had been lost in the transfer from the Child Support Agency to the CMS. In fairness, I should say that the CMS is replacing a discredited system; that, as I mentioned, coronavirus will have played a part, especially in the spring; and that by the autumn engagement has been good. But for my constituent, these delays have been incredibly frustrating. She told me:

“Any correspondence that I have had with Child Maintenance has been met with the same poor failures in service. Despite all of my efforts there appears to be a distinct lack of accountability to take positive action on my case.”

The second thing that struck me was the bureaucratic hoops that my constituent had to jump through in order for the money to be recovered. Her case had recently been transferred from the old CSA and, as a result, the CMS had in effect to start from scratch on trying to recover the money, even though it had been through the court order process previously. That meant more hoops to jump through, including two occasions when her ex-partner had the ability to launch a review of a decision that had been made by the CMS, which of course he did. All these served to do was to delay and frustrate the recovery of money that was already 18 years overdue. I understand why those safeguards are in place, but it is incredibly frustrating. My constituent felt that the CMS was being more responsive to her ex-partner than to her.

Thirdly, there is the fact that my constituent had to come to me for this to be unblocked. She was getting nowhere on her own. When I escalated the case, I was able to speak to the Minister and to the case manager, and that was a great help, but as is so often the case, as I have learned over the last year, it should not have to be that way. MPs are who people go to when they have exhausted every other option. It should not have to take significant and sustained engagement from me and my casework team to resolve issues. We have to start designing processes that work for people. The tragedy is that my constituent’s children are now adults. They have grown up, and they have missed out on the support they needed at the time they needed it.