Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if she will take steps to abolish all Child Maintenance Service for parents with care who are victim-survivors of domestic abuse.

The Department has recently concluded a public consultation on policy changes. This included proposals to remove the Direct Pay service (where parents pay each other directly) and managing all CMS cases in one service to allow the CMS to tackle non-compliance faster.

The consultation also sought views on how victims and survivors of domestic abuse can be better supported to use CMS and whether removing Direct Pay completely would benefit victims and survivors of domestic abuse. This follows the Child Support Collection (Domestic Abuse) Act receiving Royal Assent in June 2023, which recognised that Direct Pay may not always be appropriate for victims and survivors of domestic.

Removing Direct Pay would mean all maintenance payments would be monitored and transferred within the scheme. As all payments would flow via CMS, the CMS would be able to automatically identify any that were missed, late or partial and immediately take action to re-establish compliance. This would also reduce the ability for perpetrators of domestic abuse to exploit the communication channel needed for direct pay to function for the purposes of abuse; and prevent abusers from inflicting economic control and coercion through withholding CM payments.

Feedback from the consultation is being considered and a Government response will be published in due course.