Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many and what proportion of (a) Paying Parents and (b) Receiving Parents using the Child Maintenance Service disclosed domestic abuse in 2023-24.

Child Maintenance Service (CMS) did not capture the data requested on proportion of (a) Paying Parents and (b) Receiving Parents using the Child Maintenance Service who disclosed domestic abuse in 2023-24. Therefore, this information is not readily available to provide. To extract this data would involve the manual review of all CMS cases, at a significant cost to the department and taxpayer.

The Department is assessing how it can provide statistics on domestic abuse now the application fee exemption statistics are no longer published. The Department's Chief Statistician will oversee the development of these statistics to make sure they meet the Code of Practice for Statistics.