Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what analysis his Department has undertaken of the reasons why assessed child maintenance liabilities are not paid in full, broken down by (a) deliberate non-payment, (b) affordability concerns, (c) disputed assessments, (d) administrative factors and (e) other reasons.

The Department recently published research which was commissioned as part of the wider evidence base used to inform the Department's review of the child maintenance calculation.

Amongst other things, this looked at the reasons given by both Paying and Receiving Parents as to why they did not pay or receive their full calculated amount of maintenance. These results are discussed in the chapter entitled ‘Insights on liabilities and hypothetical changes’.

These findings are based on the reasons for non-compliance self-reported by a sample of CMS users.