Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if his Department will make an assessment of the potential merits of changing the policy of the Child Maintenance Service to ensure that parents with historic unpaid child maintenance make repayments apportioned equally amongst cases rather than the current order of priority in use for the recovery of arrears.

The Child Maintenance Services (CMS) main focus is to collect money owed to children who will benefit today, thereby preventing the build-up of arrears under CMS.

Therefore, the CMS continues to prioritise the collection of maintenance on cases that are still supporting a qualifying child.

When the ongoing maintenance on these cases has been satisfied, any remaining funds will be allocated, as per CMS payment allocation hierarchy, to cases with historic arrears on them.