£3bn in outstanding child maintenance payments ‘may never be collected’
At least £3 billion in child maintenance payments ordered by the old Child Support Agency (CSA) may never be paid, the Whitehall spending watchdog has disclosed.
The National Audit Office (NAO) said three-quarters of the £4 billion in outstanding payments still owed by absent parents – some dating back more than 20 years – have been categorised as “uncollectable” by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
A further £527 million of arrears is described as “potentially collectable” while just £366 million is assessed as being “likely to be collected”.
The CSA, originally set up in 1993, was finally replaced in 2012 by a new system run by the DWP’s Child Maintenance Service (CMS) as ministers attempted to draw a line under its record of backlogs and poor customer service.
The NAO said that as of September 2016, there were more than 1.1 million cases in arrears. Although the majority related to the old CSA schemes, 96,800 were from the new CMS programme.
While absent parents owing more than £20,000 accounted for just 3.8% of the total number of cases in arrears, they owed 39% of the amount outstanding – some £1.4 billion.
Since the introduction of the CMS scheme, the NAO said the DWP had reduced the number of enforcements actions it was taking, with a 69% fall in the number of orders issued deducting the sums owed from a parent’s earnings between 2012-13 and 2015-16.
Under current plans, the DWP aims to end payments on 799,000 CSA cases with continuing child maintenance by December 2017. These cases will then be closed along with a further 588,000 where payments had stopped but were still in arrears.
However, the work was taking place more slowly than planned with just 33% of “active” cases having been closed by September 2016, against the DWP’s expectation that it would be around 50%.
The NAO said the number of cases where the DWP still had to calculate the arrears before closing the case had risen by 163,000.
While the DWP had estimated that almost two thirds of parents whose case was closed would apply to join the CMS scheme, as of April 2016 only around a fifth had actually done so. Three months after case closure, half of parents had no new arrangements in place.
The chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee Meg Hillier said: “A million and a half families rely on Government-run schemes to ensure they get the right child maintenance payments.
“DWP must do more to make sure these vulnerable families don’t lose out from the changes.”
A DWP spokesman said: “The old system wasn’t good enough, which is why the CSA has been replaced, and today nearly 90% of parents are paying the maintenance they owe.
“We are taking enforcement action in a higher proportion of historic cases than in the past and will be publishing a strategy for addressing arrears in due course.”
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