The Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008 gave the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission, which took over the administration of the Child Support Agency from the Department for Work and Pensions, a statutory objective of maximising the number of effective child maintenance arrangements. This objective was not carried over to the new system, despite many MPs and Peers voicing their misgivings.
But the Department for Work and Pensions does produce official statistics on the numbers of children “benefiting from child maintenance”, which it regularly proclaims in press releases. Through slippery use of language, and the acquiescence of the UK Statistics Authority, it claims that any case where at least one payment has been received in the preceding quarter is “effective”.
A father can pay as little as one penny in a thirteen week period and be counted in DWP statistics as “contributing towards child maintenance”! This is how the Child Maintenance Service is able to claim that around 80 per cent of fathers are paying child maintenance while simultaneously collecting only about half the child maintenance due.
Duplicitous semantics are at the very heart of the Child Maintenance Service. What used to be called “non resident parents” - 97 per cent fathers - are now called “paying parents” - whether or not they pay anything. And what used to be called “parents with care” - 97% mothers - are now called “receiving parents” - even if they don’t receive a bean. I am now a “receiving parent” apparently - despite having received nothing since 2010!
On 15 April 2013 Labour MP Cathy Jamieson asked what proportion of Child Support Agency cases had received payment in full, in part, and not at all. Steve Webb supplied figures showing that, broadly, 60 per cent paid in full, 20 per cent paid in part, 16 per cent paid nothing, and 4 per cent were not charged. He confirmed that “A case is classed as having a positive maintenance outcome if a payment has been received via the collections service in the quarter, or if a maintenance direct arrangement is in place.”
Steve Webb was, of course, a member of the inner circle of the British religious right, despite being a Liberal Democrat MP. He was handed responsibility for child maintenance in September 2012 after Maria Miller was promoted because he was a safe pair of hands and in on the con. To find out more, click here.
Those figures were for Child Support Agency cases, 21% of which were Maintenance Direct cases (where the CSA assessed the amount payable but fathers paid mothers directly rather than through the CSA). The figures assumed 100% compliance in Maintenance Direct cases, with no supporting evidence. The figures also included a residual proportion of cases which began before 2008, and therefore included mothers who the Government had forced to make CSA applications even if they might have been able to make private arrangements. The Government admitted that the Child Maintenance Service replacing the CSA would be dealing with a more difficult cohort of parents, so although I have not been able to find official CMS statistics on partial payments, the proportion of part payers and non payers is likely to be higher. The CMS charges a 20% collection fee to fathers which is supposed to act as an incentive for him to pay in full and on time. However, as I show here, fathers can avoid the fees by paying nothing at all, or by under paying, in which case their fees are deducted from payments passed to mothers.
On 16 May 2013 The Guardian reported on DWP’s misleading claim that 81% of maintenance claims were being paid: “In an extreme (hypothetical) case, it seems, a parent paying a single penny of a single installment of child maintenance would count as compliant under the DWP’s measure.”
In 2018 the DWP confirmed to me, in response to a Freedom of Information request, that “any payment of 1p or over would be counted as contributing”.
On 28 November 2011 Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope said to Peers:
“Amendment 113B would make sure that the principal objective available to CMEC in its previous non-departmental-public-body status, to maximise the number of those children who live apart from one or both parents for whom effective maintenance arrangements are in place, was enshrined in law. CMEC is being abolished as a non-departmental public body and being taken into an executive agency, and therefore does not have that objective. All we have now is assurances from Ministers. The Minister, Maria Miller, gave rather a weak assurance to the Public Bill Committee, saying that we could rely on ministerial assurances. I am sure that we can, but that is not my experience with all Ministers all the time. I should like to hear what the Government have to say about the prospect of trying to put back that basic overriding objective into the work of the commission. As a consequence, a two-yearly report on progress on meeting that objective would be valuable.”
Baroness Sherlock, a former chief executive of the National Council for One Parent Families and a former non-executive director of CMEC, cautioned against trust the assurances of “the minister of the day” and warned that without a statutory objective of maximising the number of effective child maintenance arrangements, charging parents would “come to be seen primarily as a means of deterring people from using the statutory system in order to save considerable amounts of money in administration to the state.”
Lord McKenzie asked Lord De Mauley to explain why the Government had no plans to transfer CMEC’s statutory objective back to the Department for Work and Pensions and urged the Government to reconsider.
Lord De Mauley swiftly brushed aside Peers’ worries: “The first part of Amendment 113B seeks to place an objective on the Secretary of State through the provisions of the Child Support Act 1991 to maximise the number of effective maintenance arrangements for children who live apart from one or both parents. This is the current statutory objective of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission. The commission also has a number of statutory functions, one of which is to provide the statutory service currently delivered by the CSA. When the commission is abolished, its functions will transfer to the Secretary of State exactly as they now stand. Its statutory objective will not, however, transfer to the Secretary of State as the objective was specific to the commission in a way that the functions are not. So the issue that noble Lords are raising is what will happen when the commission is abolished and its functions transfer to the Secretary of State.
The Government's position is unequivocal, and I am glad to have this opportunity to reiterate for the record our commitment to the objective of maximising the number of effective maintenance arrangements for children who live apart from one or both parents. I hope that that satisfies my noble friend's request for a strong assurance. When the delivery of functions has been given to an arm's-length body, as is presently the case with the commission, then clearly good governance and clear accountability suggest setting the organisation an objective in statute against which it can be held to account. However, legislation is not necessary in order for the Secretary of State to work towards his own objective. The whole thrust of the Public Bodies Bill, of which the abolition of the commission is one instance, is to increase ministerial accountability.”
On 25 January 2012 Lord McKenzie of Luton, referring to the mandatory gateway conversation that mothers would be obliged to have with Child Maintenance Options said:
“There were concerns that this process would be a way of screening out parents, particularly parents with care, from the statutory scheme. These were heightened by the potential loss of the statutory requirement to maximise the number of children benefiting from effective maintenance arrangements, which is an obligation of CMEC but is not to carry over to the successor-the executive agency-when that comes into being.”
Lord De Mauley clarified: “We want parents to pause for thought when contacting us, before deciding whether to proceed with making an application to the statutory service. We believe that the best way to achieve this is for parents to undertake a telephone call with a specially trained adviser. The only requirement on the parents contacting us before entering the statutory scheme will be to engage in this conversation and to discuss whether they have considered their alternatives. The adviser will be able to provide advice and signpost the parent to other support available, if required.”
The “specially trained advisors” to whom Lord De Mauley referred were Child Maintenance Options call handlers who were specially trained by fathers’ rights extremists, Karen and Nick Woodall of the Centre for Separated Families.
In March 2012 the Government response to the consultation on the abolition of CMEC said that: “Ministers do not need such statutory objectives to be able to promote child maintenance arrangements”
It falsely claimed that: “There is no incentive for the Secretary of State to do anything other than to maximise the number of effective arrangements in place. For example, a reduction in payments by non-resident parents could increase child poverty and increase the overall benefit bill.”
In reality, as I show throughout this website and particularly in the sections War on women and the evolution of the British religious right, one main purpose of the child maintenance reforms was precisely to increase child poverty in order to prove the theory that single mothers cause poverty and to engineer adverse outcomes for the children of single mothers in order to bolster marriage and stigmatise cohabitation and divorce.
On 25 April 2012, Conservative MP Harriet Baldwin, standing in for Anne Begg as Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, tried to pin Maria Miller down about her reasons for refusing to transfer the statutory objective to maximise the number of children receiving child maintenance to the new system.
140513
Asked by Dame Anne Begg on 4 February 2013
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what amount of child maintenance has to be paid, over what period, and with what degree of regularity, for a child maintenance arrangement, whether private or statutory, to be judged by his Department as (a) compliant or (b) effective.
Steve Webb: Statutory cases administered through the collection service are recorded as compliant, and therefore effective, when a scheduled payment has been received through the collection service in the preceding quarter. Statutory cases recorded as Maintenance Direct at the end of a quarter are considered compliant and therefore effective. The assumption for Maintenance Direct cases is that the amount of child maintenance calculated is being paid and received, and that one of the parents would contact us if their Maintenance Direct arrangement was no longer working. Statutory scheme performance is reported on a quarterly basis in the Child Support Agency Quarterly Summary Statistics, which is available here:
http://statistics.dwp.gov.uk/asd/index.php?page=csa
Child Maintenance Options clients' circumstances are tracked through a quarterly representative survey. Clients are considered to have an effective family-based maintenance arrangement when they report that a regular (or ad hoc) financial arrangement is in place where at least some of the agreed amount is always/usually received on time and/or where the arrangement is working very/fairly well.
Details of the Child Maintenance Options outcomes survey are available here:
On 20 May 2013 the Department for Work and Pensions published a press release claiming that “The proportion of separated parents who are paying for their children through the Child Support Agency has reached an historic high, with more than 4 in 5 parents meeting their financial responsibility, new official statistics show.” Steve Webb lied that “We now live in a society where paying for your children after a break-up is the norm”.
On 6 August 2013 Steve Webb wrote to Sir Andrew Dilnot, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority, to clarify that when the Department for Work and Pensions had recently issued a press release claiming more than four in five parents were “meeting their financial responsibility”, it should have stated that more than four in five parents were “paying towards their financial responsibility”.
On 11 September 2013 Steve Webb issued a press release claiming that “more than 4 in 5 parents are now paying towards their children through the Child Support Agency”.
On 4 February 2014 Baroness Sherlock asked Lord Freud: “On the cost objective, the Government are clear that they expect to score substantial financial gains from the new scheme being introduced, especially as the result of charging fees. Fees both bring in income and reduce running costs, as parents are deterred from using the system. However, I looked in vain for a parallel level of ambition to increase the amount of child support that would actually reach children, a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. What are the Government’s ambitions in that connection? After all, the point of a child support scheme is not to be efficient. It should be efficient, but its point is in fact to get money from the non-resident parent to the parent with care. Presumably the Government have some ambitions for increasing the amount of maintenance that is going to be transferred to children as a result of the reforms. Could they help us on that point?”
In December 2014 the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, presented to Parliament “Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008 Post-legislative Scrutiny - Memorandum to the Work and Pensions Committee Cm 8986, in which he correctly, but wilfully misleadingly, claimed that more than 80% of cases received a contribution towards their current liability.
On 25 January 2015 Steve Webbs issued a press release entitled “Absent parents now paying maintenance cash at record levels”, claiming that: “The number of absent parents who are now paying towards the cost of their children through the Child Support Agency (CSA) has hit an all-time high, thanks to tough enforcement rules now in place. Nearly 9 out of 10 of non-resident parents within the CSAsystem are now contributing towards child maintenance to support their children, with help from the CSA.”
On 7 December 2016 Caroline Nokes MP lied to the Work and Pensions Committee:
“We are talking about a minority, a tiny, tiny minority of cases. The vast majority of people using the Child Maintenance Service are paying regularly.
Seven out of eight non-resident parents are paying a contribution towards their maintenance liabilities every single month. That is the space that we are in: 90% of child maintenance is paid and it is paid on time. We are now talking about the remaining 10%.”
In May 2017 Bryson Purdon Research published “Understanding the lives of separating and separated families in the UK: what evidence do we need?” Caroline Bryson gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee in May 2011 alongside Nick Woodall of the Centre for Separated Families. She was a co-author of DWP Research Report 503, which Christine Skinner coached Maria Miller, Iain Duncan Smith and other government ministers to misrepresent.
“CMS records are also used to produce quarterly government statistics on the use of the system, the levels of child support due, payment history and family circumstances. While useful for tracking the number and profile of CMS users, as well as some level of compliance with the arrangement, they collected only limited data. In particular, they present cases by the non-resident parent only (i.e. a father with non-resident children with two different mothers is recorded as just one case), they assume that all Direct Pay cases are completely compliant (i.e. that cases where the service does not make collection are all paid on time and in full) and they do not detail any enforcement mechanisms applied by the CMS to ensure payment.”
On 30 October 2018 Baroness Sherlock asked Baroness Buscombe:
“What is the Government’s current target for the proportion of parents who do not use CMS and who will go on to have an appropriate family- based arrangement? What target has been set for increasing compliance by non-resident parents from that 57% current base? What target has DWP set for future arrears to avoid us simply being back here again in five years, with Ministers wanting to write off arrears on the current system on the grounds that they need to have a fresh start for everyone before a new system is devised?”
Baroness Buscombe replied:
“I was asked whether we have targets for family-based arrangements. We do not have targets. We want families to make an arrangement which suits them. Around 25% of families who contacted the Child Maintenance Options service chose a family-based arrangement. Other families may make these arrangements without speaking to the service. Family-based arrangements tend to have high rates of compliance.
I was asked what target has been set for increased compliance and arrears. Again, we do not set formal targets. Our ambition remains to take the new powers debated today and continue to build on our success to date. Again, it is more about listening, watching and seeing how these regulations work out, bearing in mind that, as I have already made clear and the regulations make clear, we can revisit this instrument within five years if it is found to be ineffective.”
On 12 November 2018 the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Justin Tomlinson, told MPs, legislating on the Draft Child Maintenance (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2018: “I am pleased to say that, following careful staged implementation, the new service is working well and avoiding the problems that beset the previous statutory child maintenance schemes.”
Had he been honest, however, he ought to have said that the new system is working extremely well for the Government, which wanted to rid itself of the millstone of child maintenance and automate and simplify the administration of its remaining statutory vestiges, and extremely well for fathers who do not want to pay child support. As the Government steadfastly refused, back in 2012, to transfer the Child Support Agency’s statutory objective of maximising the number of children for whom effective child maintenance arrangements were in place, it can now confidently claim that the system is working well.