Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many and what proportion of decisions by the Child Maintenance Service have been appealed against in each of the last five years; and how many appeals have been successfully upheld at Tribunal.

The Department publishes quarterly Child Maintenance Service (CMS) statistics, with the latest statistics available to September 2022, here: Child Maintenance Service statistics

The quarterly number of appeals and outcomes from April 2015 to September 2022 can be found in Table 11 of the National Tables

The department does not track the number of appeals as a proportion of decisions that potentially carry rights of appeal. Initial calculations made on applications carry rights of dispute and appeal as do annual reviews carried out annually on every case as do some change in circumstances. Either parent may raise a dispute or appeal on a decision and one decision can therefore be subject to two requests to appeal. Volumes of applications, cases and changes can be found in Table 1, Table 4 & Table 9. As we do not record how many changes in circumstances result in a new liability, we cannot give an accurate proportion of decisions made that leads to an appeal.