Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate she has made of the number of people using limited companies to declare incorrect incomes to avoid child support payments in the last 12 months.

The Department does not collect data on paying parents who use limited companies. The Child Maintenance Service obtains income information directly from HMRC and includes almost all sources of income declared to that Department for tax purposes. The specially trained Financial Investigation Unit (FIU) is able to look into cases where there is concern about a parent’s income. The FIU has been expanded since it was set up in 2014; and between October and December 2017 it opened over 1200 complex earner investigations. We recently consulted on a new Child Maintenance Compliance and Arrears strategy which proposed further improvements to the treatment of the income of complex earners, such as high value assets owned by a parent being used to create a notional income. Our response to the consultation will be published in due course.