Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many paying parents party to a child maintenance agreement are assessed to have an income of less than £12,570 per year; how many paying parents are in receipt of universal credit; and how many paying parents are estimated to be earning less than the receiving parent.

At the end of September 2024, there were 289,000 Paying Parents using the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) with a recorded income of less than £12,570 per year. This is 43% of all Paying Parents for whom we held income information.

Information on the number of Paying Parents claiming Universal Credit is published quarterly on StatXplore, as part of the ‘CMS Paying Parents’ dataset. Information on Universal Credit claims is generally not available for the latest published quarter, therefore the most recent information available relates to the end of June 2024 (rather than September 2024, as for most other information in this dataset). At this time, 199,000 Paying Parents claimed Universal Credit. This is 29% of all 675,000 Paying Parents who were using CMS at this time.

The income of the Receiving Parent does not factor into the CMS maintenance calculation, and so this information is not collected by CMS. Therefore, the information requested in the third part of your question is not readily available (and to produce it would incur disproportionate cost). However, you may be interested in the latest Separated Families Statistics, which contain some information, derived from survey data, of the position of ‘non-resident parent’ and ‘parent with care’ households within the Great Britain income distribution. See in particular section 6 of the release document. These statistics include all separated families and are not specific to CMS users.