Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps he is taking to improve support for children impacted by decisions taken by the CMS.

The Child Maintenance Service (CMS) supports children through ensuring sustainable child maintenance arrangements are in place. In 2025, £1.6bn maintenance was arranged by CMS. Taken together with private arrangements, this has the ongoing impact of lifting 120,000 children out of relative low income (on an after-housing-costs basis).

To further improve our support, we intend to remove Direct Pay when parliamentary time allows. Moving to a single, strengthened Collect and Pay system will allow the CMS to monitor all payments, identify missed or partial payments immediately, and take faster enforcement action. Ahead of this change, the CMS is already moving non-compliant parents more quickly from Direct Pay to Collect and Pay to enable us to tackle non-compliance faster and get more money flowing to children.

We also intend to enhance the effectiveness of CMS in collecting arrears payments by streamlining the enforcement process. This will remove the requirement to obtain a court issued liability order and instead allow the Secretary of State to make an administrative liability order. Introducing this simpler administrative process will enable the CMS to take faster action against those paying parents who actively avoid their responsibilities and will get money to children faster. The CMS are working with His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service and the Scottish Government to establish a process for implementation and plan to introduce regulations to Parliament as soon as possible.

CMS undertake regular quality assurance checks to ensure processes are delivered accurately, reducing the requirement for rework and reinforcing our aim to ‘get it right first time’. These measures demonstrate our commitment to minimising delays and ensuring that child maintenance reaches children promptly.