Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Department of Work and Pensions, if she will increase resources at the Child Maintenance Service to improve response times to enquiries.

The numbers of people working within the Child Maintenance Service is reviewed regularly to ensure we have sufficient resources to answer customer calls and progress cases. So far in 2018, we have recruited 210 people into the Child Maintenance Service, with these people joining us between February 2018 and June 2018, and we are currently undertaking recruitment for a further 300 people to join the Child Maintenance Service during July and August. We will continue to review the volumes of work against our forecasting model to ensure that we adjust staffing levels as required.