Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of the Child Maintenance Service Collect and Pay service fees on families.

The Government is dedicated to ensuring parents meet their obligations to children, taking robust enforcement action against those who do not.

Cases in Collect & Pay represent the most difficult cases, as many of these have been unwilling to pay voluntarily or have not been compliant in a Direct Pay arrangement. Cases where the paying parent has missed payments or demonstrated behaviour that suggests they are unlikely to pay, can be put on the Collect and Pay service. Fees only apply to the Collect and Pay Service. A fee of 20% is added to what the paying parent needs to pay, while 4% is deducted from maintenance paid to receiving parents. The receiving parent charge is only applied from the maintenance that the Child Maintenance Service has successfully collected.

Fees were introduced in 2014, partly with the objective to encourage greater collaboration and more family-based arrangements rather than using a statutory service.

After Collect and Pay fees were introduced an assessment was carried out by the previous government and published in The Child Maintenance Reforms; 30 Month Review of charging.

In July 2024 the government consulted on the proposal for wider reform to consolidate the CMS into a single service type where the CMS monitors and transfers payments. The consultation Improving the collection and transfer of payments, also proposed a new fee structure of just 2% for receiving parents, deducted from maintenance received; 2% for compliant paying parents, on top of maintenance owed; and 20% for non-compliant paying parents, on top of maintenance owed.

Following consideration of public responses concerning fees and other proposals in the consultation, and subsequent ministerial decisions, next steps will be detailed in the Government Response, which will be published in due course.