Report finds parents not getting the child maintenance they are entitled to
A report by the single parent charity Gingerbread has found that many parents using the Child Maintenance Service (‘CMS’) are not getting the child maintenance they are entitled to, with the result that many children are going without daily essentials.
The CMS is used by separated parents who are unable to agree child maintenance arrangements between themselves. The CMS offers two levels of service: ‘Direct Pay’, where the CMS calculates the amount of maintenance to be paid, and parents arrange payments between themselves; and ‘Collect and Pay’, where the CMS will collect and manage payments between the parents when parents cannot arrange payments between themselves, or if the paying parent does not keep up with payments.
The report summarised the findings from research funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which explored separated parents’ experiences of child maintenance and the CMS. The research included 24 interviews with separated parents, and 1.622 responses to a survey of separated parents.
The research found that:
1. Children are going without essentials because they are not getting the maintenance they are entitled to. The survey found that 57% of parents with care who have a child maintenance arrangement in place did not receive the full amount of maintenance agreed regularly. Further to this, Gingerbread point out that Department for Work and Pension statistics reveal that in 2023 41% of separated families had no maintenance arrangement in place at all, and 42% of children covered by a Collect and Pay arrangement with the CMS received no payments in the quarter ending June 2024.
2. The CMS is failing to protect people who have experienced domestic abuse and in some cases is making the abuse worse. Among the survey respondents, 77% of parents with care using the CMS said they had experienced domestic abuse from the other parent, and 45% of those reported an increase in abusive behaviour because of involvement of the CMS.
3. The CMS contributes to poorer relationships between separated parents and dealing with the CMS itself is having a negative impact on the well-being of separated parents. 93% of non-resident parents (i.e. parents with whom the children are not living) and 58% of resident parents said that their experience of the CMS has made their relationship with the other parent worse, and 96% of non-resident parents and 72% of parents with care said that their experience of dealing with the CMS has made their mental health and wellbeing worse.
Gingerbread point to four issues underlying these findings:
1. Poor communication and a poor experience of using the CMS;
2. Exploitation of available loopholes in the system by the paying parent, for example underreporting income, declaring self-employment with minimal profits, and taking payments ‘cash in hand’ to avoid official income records;
3. A lack of action from Government in ensuring maintenance is secured; and
4. Poor understanding of domestic abuse by the CMS.
The report makes four key recommendations to address these issues:
1. That parents using the CMS should be assigned dedicated named caseworkers, so that they don’t have to keep retelling their story, and to ensure issues are understood and followed up on.
2. That there should be a means to contact the service digitally, to reduce the stress of long waiting times on the phone and increase confidence that the right things were being communicated both ways.
3. That action be taken to step up on enforcement, to better assess income and to close loopholes that allow non-resident parents to avoid payments.
4. Lastly, that there be a transformation in training for CMS staff in domestic abuse and for the service to become trauma informed.
You can read the full report here.
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