Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the National Audit Office's projections of the Child Maintenance Service arrears reaching £1 billion by 2031.
The Department has not forecast caseloads beyond 2025. The National Audit Office (NAO) forecast is a simple linear projection that assumes the legislative and economic environment will remain unchanged over the next nine years and does not account for the Child Maintenance Service’s (CMS) ageing population of qualifying children.
Up to December 2021, the CMS has arranged £5.4 billion of child maintenance and £451 million (8%) was unpaid.