Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent steps the Child Maintenance Service has taken to help recover arrears in child maintenance payments.

The Child Maintenance Service (CMS) continues to take rigorous action to collect maintenance, combining robust negotiation activity with the highly effective use of its extensive range of Enforcement Powers. This approach is driven by the Payment Compliance strategy increasing CMS compliance influencing activities to tackle non-paying cases and challenge non-compliant behaviours. CMS applies a Continuous Improvement focus to Enforcement strategy and processes.

In the quarter ending September 2023, of 180,000 Paying Parents due to pay via the Collect and Pay service:

• 49,000 (27%) had a deduction from earnings order or request in place
• 64,000 (35%) were due to pay via deduction from benefits
• 69,000 (38%) were due to pay via other methods of payment, predominantly default standing orders

Depending on a Paying Parent’s employment status we use Deduction from Earnings orders or deductions from bank accounts. We have collected in excess of £16m via deduction orders in 2023. We move cases swiftly to Legal Enforcement. Securing a Liability Order (LO) for 11k cases in the courts, cases are referred to Enforcement Agents (Bailiffs) who have collected almost £5m in 2023. Where house ownership is established, charging orders and orders for sale are instigated. CMS will quickly move to taking court action for the removal of driving licence, committal to prison or removal of passport. £4.5m collected from cases at this stage.

As a result of this intense effort to increase enforcement activity £36m collected from arrears.

The planned introduction of the Administrative Liability Order in 2024 will remove the need to apply to the courts and will reduce the current average time of 20 weeks to secure an LO to 6 weeks.

The published statistics below provides data to September 2023 Section 9 Enforcement and the National tables 7.1 and 7.2.

Child Maintenance Service statistics: data to September 2023 - GOV.UK(www.gov.uk)