Children: Maintenance
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many requests by parents to move their cases to collect and pay following the failure of the other parent to make a child maintenance payment in each of the last 5 years.
Answered by Andrew Western
A principle of The Child Maintenance Service (CMS) is to increase levels of cooperation between separated parents and encourage parents to meet their responsibilities to provide their children with financial support.
The CMS has two service types: Direct Pay, where it calculates a liability and allows parents to make their own arrangements to pay; and Collect and Pay, where it calculates the liability and administers the transaction. Legislation requires that both parents are given the opportunity to try Direct Pay unless the paying parent demonstrates an unwillingness to pay their maintenance liability. When this happens, a parent can request a move to Collect and Pay service.
The full information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.
The Department publishes quarterly statistics for the Child Maintenance Service and the latest statistics are currently available to December 2024. Table 3 of the latest National tables provides the number of arrangements moving from one service type to another within the CMS each quarter, from October 2015 to December 2024.
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