What’s Happening With The Child Maintenance Service?

The Government Response to the House of Lords Public Services Committee Recommendations.

Following on from my previous post about the proposed reform of the Child Maintenance Service (CMS), I am pleased to say we now have the government’s formal response to the Recommendations put forward by the House of Lords Public Services Committee. This has been an extensive Inquiry, with a call for evidence from the public as well as many consultations with charities and organisations being undertaken. You can read about it HERE.

It also forms part of the government’s Child Poverty Strategy and I have been involved via, the brilliant single parent charity, Gingerbread’s crucial #FixtheCMS campaign, contributing behind the scenes alongside some other single parents with experience of using it.

I meant to give you a tl;dr version of the 89 page Recommendations when they first came out, but the more I wrote, the more it felt like I was paying lip service to what felt already a great deal like lip service and it got too frustrating, so, today, I can go one better and share the Recommendations together with government’s response to each. The government had two months to consider what the House of Lords’ Public Services Committee put forward and where it doesn’t accept the Recommendations they have to explain why.

You can read the full, formal response HERE.

And this is Gingerbread's response to the government's response HERE.

These are my thoughts, which are admittedly totally biased because my experience of using the service has been dire, or even downright dangerous, and because too many women I know suffer the same. It isn’t just about child poverty, it’s about the psychological, emotional, physical and social impacts of having to pick up the slack, or as one of my commenters, @omz , put it previously ‘the painful, bone-crushing reality.’

But I am one of the lucky ones, as my ex-husband is employed and we were able to obtain details of the income he denied via HMRC, make Deductions of Earnings orders and, finally, push for prosecution for years of unpaid maintenance. Only when faced with this, he became compliant – when it would affect him personally. He was embarrassed in front of his employers and didn’t want to be further shamed and inconvenienced by being taken to court.

I know women whose ex-partners have deliberately gone self-employed to be able to under-declare their income and others who are trapped in relationships under the threat of no financial support, but even when we’re able obtain any funds at all via the CMS, the calculations are skewed heavily in favour of the Non-Resident (paying) parent and proof of income too often falls down to us, the Receiving Parent, which is logistically ridiculous.

Let’s start with the positives, though. Almost half the 24 Recommendations have been accepted, six have been partially accepted and seven have been wholly rejected. That the Inquiry is going on at all and that it has been so far reaching and thorough, with the public and many charities contributing from both Resident and Non-Resident sides is a win and it has been an honour to be involved and to be able to report back.

The government accepts that reform is required and that around half a million children could be lifted out of poverty as a result. Plus, calculations should be split more fairly and not based on outdated legislation, communication tools (including digital) need regular reviewing, updating and improving and they advise work is ongoing in order to implement new Administrative Liability Orders (ALOs). These fall under the Child Support (Enforcement) Act 2023 and are being introduced to support enforcement of payments without needing a court hearing.

The lack of enforcement against non-payment has long been the crux of what is an abhorrent waste of tax payers’ money. I believe this might be down to the agency originally being set up to help parents who can’t pay, rather than to deal with those who refuse to, but it’s been around long enough to have learned the reality now. Round and round we go for years, having the same conversations with different staff members, while penalties for unpaid parking fines are a fact of life and a pretty good deterrent, whereas there are no penalties for unpaid maintenance and no shame around it. Perpetrators wear it like ‘a badge of honour’ as one contributor put it and I am fighting and willing to die on the hill which gets unpaid maintenance recognised as the form of Violence Against Women and Children it is. Economic and post-separation abuse, Coercive and Controlling Behaviour, Child Neglect, call it what you will, it’s our deprived children and us who end up carrying the shame and, just as Gisèle Pelicot says, shame really must change sides – something even more fitting when we consider those women forced into sex work against their will, in order to be able to provide for their children. It’s all related.

This segues nicely into some relevant further positives with the statement that ‘The Department for Work and Pensions is on a journey to become a more trauma responsive organisation’ (which the CMS falls under) and ‘Our introductory Trauma Informed Approach module has been updated, tested and successfully launched in June 2025,’ plus, as a result of a 2021 Independent Review of the processes and procedures used by the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) to support parents subjected to domestic abuse, much more training and a pilot assigning individual named caseworkers to manage more complex cases have been implemented.

This could be brilliant and it’s qualified with being mindful of how taking action on a case will be received by both parties, but it’s conditional on CMS staffing levels needing to meet the current demand, which is, again, a false economy, I feel, and I worry this could be a bit of a cop out clause. We have yet to see, but at least these conversations are happening, awareness around all forms of abuse is increasing and Gingerbread is holding the CMS to account for its failures, which brings me to some of the mixed bag and not so positives.

The CMS is insisting on moving all payments over to a Collect & Pay service, whereby they collect funds paid and pass them onto the Receiving Parent, justifying this by saying it’s easier to directly track compliance. There is a need for this in some cases as I’ve heard many a report of perpetrators using the Receiving Parent’s bank account details to send £0.01 with hundreds of abusive messages and it can also reveal a victim’s location which renders them unsafe. There have also been fees involved on both sides which mean funds paid are reduced before they are received so the children miss out further, however these fees are being reviewed.

My ex-husband currently pays via what’s called Direct Pay. It’s always late and the bare minimum – necessary little ‘wins’ for him - but he does pay and it goes straight into my bank account. Any change in the system fills me with dread as there’s no doubt he – and thousands of others - will take the opportunity to muck us about again. It really shouldn’t be this exhausting but the CMS is pressing ahead with the reform, wanting to mitigate the re-traumatising of victims and survivors, citing their possible inability to provide evidence of domestic abuse which makes them difficult to identify and also wanting to reduce the risk of exacerbating threats from perpetrators forced into the Collect & Pay service against their wishes where there is a choice of service. However, as admirable as this all seems, it doesn’t take place for a couple of years yet, so victims remain exposed for now and the evidence for switching is a sticking point on this report.

Other sticking points include working more closely with HMRC, especially over income fluctuations, not syncing maintenance calculations with those made in the Family Courts and not prioritising disincentivised non-paying parents at the new Jobcentre Plus.

And there is so much I could say about the appeals procedure currently preventing ‘either parent from being placed in an overpayment situation,’ the 90% payments being deemed ‘paid in full,’ as this is something else perpetrators exploit as another little ‘win,’ yet I can’t see anyone involved accepting 90% of their agreed salary as a matter of course, as well as the CMS enabling perpetrators to pick and choose their Parental Responsibilities, but I have laid out several double standards in my evidence to the Committee here.

So that about wraps it up, although there is, of course, much more detail in the original document and it is important to bear in mind the many people who refrain from using the CMS at all because of its deservedly poor reputation.

We, unfortunately, see the same patterns perpetuated in the Family Courts and elsewhere – perpetrators protected at the expense of women and children – and we are lucky to have the leading light of Gingerbread fighting our corner. Please sign up to them HERE (for free) to receive further updates and to support this #FixtheCMS campaign, as well their others.

They have been speaking out for single parents since 1918 and are highly respected. They offer loads of advice, information and practical support and with their long-time parliamentary influence and thriving community, they really can be a lifeline, so I’m writing this with thanks to them for playing a major part in securing these proposed reforms via the House of Lords Public Services Committee and we can keep on fighting the good fight alongside them as we still have a long way to go.

Wishing you all well,

Anya x