Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many employees have been seconded from the Child Maintenance Services (CMS) to other sections of her Department as a result of the covid-19 outbreak; when the CMS will be return to the staffing levels before the covid-19 outbreak; and if she will make a statement.

To meet the unprecedented demand for benefits during the pandemic, the Department redeployed over 10,000 staff to critical frontline work, streamlined processes and increased the capacity of our IT systems. This included approximately 1,700 out of around 6,800 members of staff from the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) to support Universal Credit (UC) and Jobseekers Allowance.

Staff began to return to the CMS from July 2020, and the Service will take a staged approach to make use of returning resource over the next few months.