Child Maintenance Service: Standards
(asked on 15th May 2025) - View Source
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of the Child Maintenance Service in reaching targets set under its service level standards in each year since 2020.
The Child Maintenance Service (CMS) has four official Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), each with a standard measure for 1) assessment accuracy, 2) application clearances, 3) change of circumstances clearances and 4) Collect and Pay compliance.
Information on the accuracy of CMS assessments, which has a standard level of >99%, is published in the annual CMS Client Funds Account, and since 2020 has shown a consistent level of 99.4%, increasing for the latest year available (2023/24) to 99.5% .
The published quarterly CMS statistics provide information on application clearances, change of circumstances clearances and Collect and Pay compliance, with the latest data available for quarter ending December 2024, and these are shown in the table below.
Quarterly Child Maintenance Service Key Performance Indicators for Applications, Change of Circumstances and Collect & Pay Compliance, April 2020 to December 2024
| Applications - cleared within 12 weeks Standard 90% | Change of Circumstances - cleared within 28 days Standard 80% | Collect and Pay compliance - paying parent paid some maintenance Standard 67% |
Apr - Jun 20 | 80% | 87% | 74% |
Jul - Sep 20 | 95% | 83% | 72% |
Oct – Dec 20 | 94% | 78% | 72% |
Jan - Mar 21 | 91% | 80% | 72% |
Apr - Jun 21 | 89% | 78% | 74% |
Jul - Sep 21 | 90% | 75% | 72% |
Oct – Dec 21 | 87% | 76% | 68% |
Jan - Mar 22 | 87% | 84% | 63% |
Apr - Jun 22 | 85% | 79% | 64% |
Jul - Sep 22 | 89% | 73% | 64% |
Oct – Dec 22 | 90% | 77% | 65% |
Jan - Mar 23 | 89% | 78% | 65% |
Apr - Jun 23 | 87% | 77% | 67% |
Jul - Sep 23 | 87% | 72% | 69% |
Oct – Dec 23 | 87% | 74% | 68% |
Jan - Mar 24 | 87% | 76% | 69% |
Apr - Jun 24 | 85% | 77% | 69% |
Jul - Sep 24 | 90% | 79% | 68% |
Oct – Dec 24 | [x] | [x] | 68% |
Source: CMS statistics, Stat-Xplore
Notes:
- [x] denotes that figures for the most recent quarter will not be available until the next publication.
- Application clearance figures are available in Table 1 of the latest CMS National tables.
- Change of circumstances clearance figures are available in Table 8 of the latest CMS National tables.
- Collect and Pay compliance figures are calculated using the CMS Paying Parents dataset on Stat-Xplore and are reported in the ‘Paying Parents and the Collect and Pay service’ section of each quarterly bulletin.
- During the quarter ending June 2020, the Child Maintenance Service was affected by the COVID-19 outbreak and the resultant changes to the Department’s operational priorities. During this period, new applications to Child Maintenance Service will have experienced a reduced level of service and will have been provided with an indicative calculation of maintenance only, which is not considered a clearance for this table. In addition, the COVID-19 outbreak may have reduced the demand for new Child Service Maintenance arrangements. This also means that only priority changes of circumstance would have been progressed during this period.
Since 2020, as part of the DWP Service Modernisation Programme, the CMS has been undergoing extensive improvements to increase the quality and range of online services available to separated parents. This program has transformed how customers can interact with CMS, providing them with the choice to make contact through digital routes while ensuring that assistance is available for those who need additional support and non-digital customers via the telephone service. These improvements have allowed case workers to focus more on actioning their work. The wide-reaching programme aims to continue to reform and modernise CMS services with increased effectiveness and efficiency.
Additionally, the CMS has amended its service to allow Direct Pay arrangements to quickly move to Collect and Pay when the Paying Parent is not paying or when Direct Pay is no longer appropriate. 14,000 arrangements moved from Direct Pay to Collect and Pay in the quarter ending December 2024 meaning CMS are collecting money for children quicker.
In the quarter ending December 2024, over 1 million children were covered by CMS arrangements, an increase of 61,000 from the quarter ending December 2023.