Children: Maintenance
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate he has made of the total amount of child maintenance arrears owed to date in Wiltshire; and how this compares to the national average.
Answered by Andrew Western
The information requested on the total amount of child maintenance arrears owed in Wiltshire is not readily available and would incur disproportionate cost to obtain.
The Department publishes Child Maintenance Service (CMS) statistics regularly and the relevant information for Great Britain can be accessed from Table 5 of the supplementary tables in the latest release.
Table 5 counts how much child maintenance due has accumulated since the CMS began, in 2012. At the end of June 2025 this was £734.3m. This figure does not include arrears incurred with the Child Support Agency pre-2012.
The CMS collected 93% of all maintenance owed since it was established in 2012. The CMS has a low percentage of unpaid maintenance with 7% (£734.3 million) of the total maintenance due to be paid since the CMS began in 2012, still to be collected through Collect & Pay. This has steadily fallen since the 17% due to be paid in March 2015.
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