Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether he has made a recent assessment of the potential merits of removing the 4% collection fees for receiving parents using the child maintenance service.

Following a public consultation on wider reforms to consolidate the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) into a single service type where the CMS collects and transfers payments, the Government published its response setting out plans to reform the CMS. This includes plans to reduce fees to 2% for both receiving parents and compliant paying parents, maintaining the 20% rate for non-compliant paying parents on top of their calculated maintenance amount.

The reformed service is expected to improve CMS’s ability to re-establish compliance more efficiently when payments break down. Retaining fees at this substantially reduced level will balance the interests of customers with the need to offset the cost of the service and provide the investment needed to make the reforms, reducing the burden on the taxpayer.

Our intention is to implement these changes as soon as parliamentary time allows.