Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many times the Child Maintenance Service has used the following enforcement sanctions to date: (1) suspended passport confiscation, (2) suspended disqualification from driving, (3) immediate prison sentence, (4) immediate passport confiscation, and (5) immediate driving disqualification.

Sanctions such as sending Paying Parents to prison, disqualifying them from holding or obtaining a passport or driving licence are a last resort and only used when every other method of recovering unpaid child maintenance has been tried. The CMS only pursues these sanctions when they believe the Paying Parent can pay but is refusing to do so. Where this is found to be the case CMS will quickly move to taking court action.

The Department publishes Child Maintenance Service (CMS) statistics regularly and the relevant information can be accessed from Table 6.2 of the supplementary tables in the latest release.

From July 2019 to June 2024, there were 4 suspended passport confiscations, 25 suspended qualifications from driving, 17 immediate prison sentences, 3 immediate passport confiscations and 2 immediate driving disqualifications.