Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps does the Child Maintenance Service have in place to calculate arrears for maintenance payments.

The Government is dedicated to ensuring parents meet their responsibilities to provide their children with financial support.

The Child Maintenance Service (CMS) aims to provide fast, accurate and transparent assessments, based on the paying parent’s income, primarily their gross annual income provided by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). If there are no significant changes in circumstances occurring, the maintenance calculation remains in place for a year at which point the CMS calculates a new liability as part of the annual review service. However, the CMS do continue to deal with unexpected events and major changes in year, in circumstances such as a move into or out of employment, or only where income changes by at least 25% from the latest annual income information provided by HMRC. This helps to keep calculations up to date and reduces the need for changes in income to be reported during the year.

Where maintenance is due to be paid, the CMS issues all customers a payment plan which details what their expected child maintenance payments are. Where parents fail to pay their on-going maintenance as expected, any unpaid amounts are then considered as arrears. For parents who use the Direct Pay service, they are required to notify the CMS if payments have not been made to allow arrears balances to be updated.

The CMS take proactive actions to move Paying Parents who are not paying their child maintenance back into compliant behaviours as soon as a missed payment is identified. Where payments have defaulted, we use our enforcement powers fairly and quickly to get cases back into payment.