Unpaid child maintenance is on course to reach £1bn, thirteen years after the CMS was created to fix exactly this

The Child Maintenance Service exists because its predecessor failed. When the Child Support Agency was wound down in 2012 it handed over a legacy of more than £3.7bn in uncollected arrears, money that had been assessed as owed to children and never collected from the parents who owed it.

The replacement service was supposed to resolve that. The Public Accounts Committee has found that unpaid maintenance owed to receiving parents on Collect and Pay is instead on course to rise to £1bn by March 2031.

The finding that should have settled the argument

The National Audit Office reviewed the service in March 2022 and concluded that its work had not, to that point, increased the number of effective child maintenance arrangements across society.

That is worth reading carefully, because it is a more damning finding than inefficiency. The NAO was not saying the service needed more resource or better systems. It was saying that the measurable net effect of the entire apparatus on whether children actually receive maintenance could not be demonstrated.

Two groups of parents, both failed, for opposite reasons

The CMS has produced an unusual political situation in which two constituencies who agree on almost nothing else agree that the service is failing them.

Receiving parents report years of non-payment, enforcement action that is discussed but never arrives, and arrears balances that grow while the case sits still. Paying parents report assessments they cannot afford, calculations that nobody at the service will explain in terms they can check, and arrears appearing on their account without a traceable origin.

Both accounts are supported by the committee evidence. The Work and Pensions Committee found that maintenance assessed for some paying parents is unaffordable and causes serious hardship, during the same period in which the Public Accounts Committee was documenting the growing arrears owed to receiving parents. These are not competing claims. They are what a broken calculation and a broken enforcement process look like from either end.

The accounts themselves

The Comptroller and Auditor General certified that the CMS financial statements for the year ended 31 March 2023 failed properly to present the Statement of Balances and its receipts and payments, identifying technical issues that did not comply with the Government Resources and Accounts Act 2000.

A service that cannot produce compliant accounts of its own is nonetheless expected to tell individual parents, to the penny, what they owe.

What the committees have asked for

Both committees have pressed for a credible plan for the arrears balance rather than a series of write-off decisions taken quietly at year end, for transparency in how a calculation is produced so that a parent can check it against their own records, and for enforcement that functions against self-employed parents and against income deliberately structured to be difficult to see.