Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate he has made of the number of parents on default rate calculations in each of the last three years.

The Department estimates that there were approximately 2,900 paying parents with a Default Maintenance Decision (DMD) as of June 2025. These were identified by searching for cases that had liability amounts and numbers of children corresponding to the current DMD rates. Counts from previous years are not readily available.