Children: Maintenance
(asked on 17th January 2019) - View Source
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many arrears-only cases are registered with the Child Maintenance Service.
Data is available on the number of arrears only cases registered with the Child Support Agency (CSA). This is available in Table 2 of the Child Support Agency Case Closure Statistics: June 2014 - September 2018 (below).
Statistics on the total number of Child Support Agency arrears only cases that have been transferred to the Child Maintenance Service (CMS), and the number of CSA arrears only cases on the CMS caseload are published in Table 8 of the same publication (Child Support Agency Case Closure Statistics).
This publication shows that as of September 2018 there were 171,700 CSA arrears only cases on the Child Maintenance Service Caseload.
Data on the number of cases with arrears accrued within the Child Maintenance Service is available from Child Maintenance Service Administrative Data. This shows that, as of September 2018, there were 6,700 cases where arrears have been accumulated solely within CMS and liability has ended. There are a further 2,700 cases with both CMS and CSA arrears where liability has ended.*
Case closure is part of the government’s 2012 vision for child maintenance reforms designed to encourage parents to consider making collaborative family based arrangements.
Since 2014, cases with the Child Support Agency have been closed in a phased manner as part of the transition to the Child Maintenance Service.
To provide CSA clients with an opportunity to consider their choice of future maintenance arrangement – including whether they could make a family based arrangement – they are signposted to the Child Maintenance Options service as part of the closure process.
Following Parliamentary approval of new regulations in December 2018, the Department is now implementing its Child Maintenance Compliance and Arrears Strategy which includes finally dealing with the remaining arrears only CSA cases. Where there is a prospect that it may be cost effective to do so, we are offering parents a chance to ask the department to attempt to collect the outstanding arrears. Arrears that are not cost effective to attempt to collect and those which parents do not want us to pursue, will be written off.
*Please note that the data supplied on arrears accrued within the Child Maintenance Service are derived from unpublished management information which was collected for internal Departmental use only, and have not been quality assured to National Statistics or Official Statistics publication standard. They should therefore be treated with caution.