Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether she has made an assessment of the adequacy of the performance of the Child Maintenance Service since the reforms announced in February 2024.

On the 26 February 2024, regulations came into place to remove the £20 Child Maintenance Service application fee as part of the Government’s response to help with the cost-of-living increase.

This has resulted in an increase in applications in the quarter to March and June 2024. In the quarter ending June 2024 there were 39,000 new applications, an increase of 6,400 applications compared with the quarter to June 2023.

The Department publishes quarterly statistics for the Child Maintenance Service. Please refer to table 1 and 2 of the national tables for data on applications and intake national-tables-child-maintenance-service-to-june-2024.ods

Additionally, the DWP was given the legal power to write off low level debt under £7.00 (£6.99 and less), where a Direct Pay and Collect and Pay case has closed, there is no ongoing liability, and no payment has been received in the previous 90 days.

Since the reform was introduced, the DWP has written off low level debt which was not cost effective for the service to chase. Therefore, this has protected the cost to the public.

The DWP is still committed to gathering debt and has recently consulted on new measures to improve enforcement. The results of this consultation will be published in due course.