Minister for Family Support,
Housing and Child Maintenance
4th Floor
Caxton House
Tothill Street
LONDON
SW1H 9DA
www.dwp.gov.uk
13th July 2018
Dear Heidi Allen MP,
I am writing to update you on the ongoing work my department is undertaking
in relation to a new Child Maintenance Compliance and Arrears Strategy as I
know you may have an interest in it. The reformed child maintenance system
which has been in place since December 2012 provides strong incentives for
parents to work together following separation and where possible, make
family-based arrangements for child maintenance. This is because of the clear
evidence that children in separated families benefit from good quality
relationships between their parents.
We know that most separated parents want to take financial responsibility for
their children and many families are able to make their own arrangements for
this. The Child Maintenance Service (CMS) is there for those unable to make
a private arrangement. Following careful, staged implementation the CMS is
working well for many parents, avoiding the delays and backlogs which
characterised the predecessor schemes. The CMS continues to pursue
paying parents who refuse to meet their obligations. As of September this year
we have 11,100 civil enforcement actions in process, around 4,000 more than
during the same period last year.
I am determined to ensure that these new arrangements continue to work well
for families and evolve to respond to wider changes in society like the growth
of self-employment. The new Child Maintenance Compliance and Arrears
Strategy takes account of evaluation of the scheme to date, customer
experiences and issues raised by stakeholders including the Work and
Pensions Select Committee. Our proposals reflect an emerging need to
further strengthen the statutory system to ensure in particular that complex
earners have a fairer maintenance assessment and that we do more to
prevent parents evading their financial obligations to their children.
Our strategy also proposes to end the uncertainty for families in the thousands
of Child Support Agency (CSA) cases with arrears which have been held in
limbo – often for many years. A situation that both the National Audit Office
and the Work and Pensions Select Committee have commented on. In many
of these cases the children are now adults themselves, the debt amounts are
often small; and in some cases when asked, parents have moved on with their
lives and are not interested in pursuing this debt. The reality is that if we were
to attempt to collect all the debt we could only recover a fraction of the £3.6
billion owed, at an estimated cost of £1.5 billion.
We plan to offer parents a final chance to ask us to consider taking action to
collect this debt, where it is likely to be possible at a reasonable cost to the
taxpayer. This would enable these cases to be finally closed in the next few
years – giving clarity for the families and allowing the CSA IT systems to be
decommissioned, making savings for the taxpayer.
We consulted on the new Child Maintenance Compliance and Arrears
Strategy between 14th December 2018 and 8th February 2018. The
consultation was well received, both stakeholders and individuals welcomed
the changes to the assessment process and new collection powers. They
also accepted the need to address the CSA cases that still have outstanding
arrears.
I formally published the department’s Child Maintenance Compliance and
Arrears Strategy yesterday and this can be found on gov.uk. This will be
followed by two packages of regulations. I expect to lay the first of these
ahead of summer recess this year and will include changes to:
improve the child maintenance assessment,
enable deductions from joint and unlimited partnership and business
accounts,
disqualify those parents who consistently fail to meet their financial
responsibility to their children from holding a UK passport; and
Address historic arrears held on CSA by giving parents the chance to
request we attempt to collect their arrears where it is cost effective to
do so.
The second package will make changes to deductions from benefits to extend
these powers so that we can continue to deduct from benefits to collect
arrears of unpaid maintenance when on-going maintenance ends. We will
also apply these powers to a broader range of benefits including Universal
Credit. It is my intention that these changes are laid in the house during the
first part of 2019.
I appreciate these changes may raise a number of queries so I would like to
invite you to an information session to give you an overview of the changes. I
am holding time in my diary on:
18th July from 17:00 – 18:30; or
23rd July from 17:00 – 19:00.
Please contact xxxx@xxx.xxx.xxx.xx if you would like to attend.
I hope you find this letter useful.
Justin Tomlinson MP
Minister for Family Support, Housing and Child Maintenance