A very warm welcome to this oral evidence session on the Child Maintenance Service. We welcome Abigail Wood, Sara D’Arcy and Sam Morfey. Would you like to introduce yourselves and your organisations before we kick off with questions?

I am Abigail Wood, and I am chief executive of Gingerbread, the charity for single-parent families.

I am Sara D’Arcy, head of external affairs at the charity Surviving Economic Abuse. We are a domestic abuse charity focusing on economic abuse, which is a form of domestic abuse where abusers control survivors’ money but also their economic resources, including post-separation.

I am Sam Morfey, the CEO of Both Parents Matter. We are a national shared parenting charity. We have been going for 52 years now. We support separated parents who are having issues seeing their children. It is mainly dads, but it is mums as well. We welcome any non-resident parent who seeks help. On child maintenance, we mainly see paying parents, but we also see people on both sides of the fence, receiving parents as well, depending on their family circumstances.

Thank you very much. We all have questions for you, and I will start. From your perspective, how do you think the Child Maintenance Service is doing? Do it on a scale of one to 10 and then explain a little bit of how you have come up with your scoring.

Our score is a generous three.

Do you want to add why you have given it that score?

I don’t believe it is producing outcomes that are fair, transparent or child-focused. I think the fundamental issue is the calculation formula. We have this rigid, algebraic formula, which is almost unique in the western world. It pitches parents against each other and fuels conflict and resentment on both sides. It is not transparent or open and does not help what is already a fraught situation. I also think it militates against shared parenting. It does not encourage shared parenting. It almost makes it too expensive to be an involved parent as the non-resident parent. I believe it also impoverishes—well, it is not just me believing it. We have had multiple parliamentary Committees and statutory bodies that have done research and produced reports that show its unaffordability, particularly for those on low incomes. It is impoverishing paying parents, especially those who want to be involved in their children’s lives and have contact costs in doing so. All these other issues are tinkering around the edges—moving to direct pay, better enforcement. The fundamental issue that is causing arrears in the first place is the broken calculation system.

I won’t put a number on it. As a charity, we focus on domestic abuse, so I will be speaking about the experience of survivors of domestic abuse and basically how abusers are weaponising the Child Maintenance Service to continue the abuse and economic control post-separation. I think the CMS at the moment is failing survivors and, most importantly, their children. We know that abusers are deliberately withholding child maintenance payments, even when they can afford to make those payments, to cause anger and emotional but also economic harm to survivors and their children. We know from the survivors we work alongside that often abusers will withhold payments at really crucial times, before Christmas, ahead of birthdays and summer holidays. That is really to cause the most devastating impact on the survivor and their ability to provide the basic essentials for their children. We know that survivors are often forced to rely on food banks, go without heating, even go without food themselves just to provide the basics for their children. The research shows that this is not a small issue. It is highly prevalent. National research conducted by Ipsos showed that one in 10 UK mothers has experienced an ex-partner deliberately withholding child maintenance support from them. This rises to one in three domestic abuse survivors, showing how widespread this issue is. From the survivor’s perspective, the CMS is often seen as enabling and facilitating perpetrators rather than safeguarding survivors, so they find the system incredibly traumatising and obviously it is pushing children into poverty because they are not getting the child support they are entitled to.

Gingerbread would give it an extremely low score. The child maintenance system is fundamentally failing in the purpose for which it was set up. It is supposed to enable both parents to contribute financially to the cost of raising their child and it is just not doing that. In the most recent quarter for which statistics are available, 24% of payments were not made at all, and for about a quarter of payments at least 90% was paid. You have the 50% in the middle where the paying parent was paying something but not quite 90%. The payments are not being made, and fundamentally this means that children are missing out on important financial support. It has been mentioned before, but I want to highlight how effective child maintenance is, when it is paid on time and in full, as a tool in reducing child poverty. It can reduce it by 25%, so it is a really important tool that is available to improve the life chances of children, and that is the most important thing here. The Child Maintenance Service is not succeeding in that function. The other way in which Gingerbread thinks it is failing is that it is unnecessarily increasing tension between parents. The majority of paying and receiving parents we have surveyed have told us that their interactions with the Child Maintenance Service have increased the tension in their relationship. On top of that, paying and receiving parents have said that engaging with the Child Maintenance Service has had a negative effect on their own emotional wellbeing.

Can you expand on that, Abigail? How is it making things worse?

I think this comes from a range of different factors. It increases tension and distrust. There is a feeling on both sides—and we will go into different types of this—that the calculation is not working for them. It also means that, when they are having contact through the system, information is not getting through. It is a source of enormous stress for both parents, and that spills over into feeling that it is a source of stress with their ex-partner, constantly having to phone up the CMS, sitting on hold for 45 minutes, having to explain the situation that you explained to them previously, and explaining it again and again. That inevitably brings a degree of tension into a separated relationship, and ideally we want separated parents to have as positive a relationship as they possibly can.

You all touched on the perception of fairness and trust. I think that is an important point, particularly given that the service is designed to bring people together and it is in the best interests of children. I get casework, as many of us around the table will, on both sides of the equation, where receiving parents are not getting the money and support they need and where paying parents feel aggrieved because they are perhaps paying more or being treated unfairly as a result of the system. I come from a single-parent family. My mum brought up three children on her own, and we didn’t have any recourse to the Child Maintenance Service or whatever it was back then, but essentially I accept that a robust system is there for the interests of the children. Unfortunately, at the moment the perception, at least among many MPs, is that it is not working. Sam, what is your view on the balance of fairness, how that has got out of kilter and what we can do to put it back in kilter?

We need to look at how other countries do it. This is a fraught area and the danger is that, with the way it is set up, it becomes a zero-sum game—more money for the paying parent is less money for the child and vice versa. The fundamental problem is the lack of transparency. I am sure that Abigail and Sara can talk about the transparency issues for receiving parents. If you are a non-resident parent trying to be involved in a child’s life, there is no recognition for the cost of contact. If you want to stay involved, there are travel costs, accommodation costs and often contact centre costs. All these things are not taken into account properly in the calculation. We also have a situation where there is no recognition of the financial circumstances of the receiving parent. The UK is pretty much an outlier on this. There are very few countries that have a formula that purely looks at the income of the paying parent. The CMS will defend it as simple and the best way to get money to the children. I disagree. Other countries manage to find formulas that are open and transparent. For example, when you go to court, whether it is over contact or finances, the court puts the child first. It looks at the child’s needs and how both parents can provide that, whether it is looking after the child or finances. When you get to the CMS, you have a binary formula that purely looks at one person’s income, so that immediately creates a sense of unfairness. It produces unaffordable calculations, particularly for the lower paid. It is not just me saying this. Many parliamentary reviews have said exactly the same thing, which underlines the problem of arrears, but when you are in a situation where you are trying to do the right thing—I am not talking about the hardened non-payers, which is a different sector—we see the people who want to be involved and make a contribution to their child’s life are struggling to do so. When you have all the other costs that are not being taken care of, fairly draconian state-sponsored measures are put in place if you miss a payment. At the same time, you are trying to have contact with your child, and this is where the sense of unfairness and injustice comes in. There are minimal consequences if the other parent, for no good reason, breaches a contact order. If you compare the level of measures and the way that the state comes down unfairly on single missed payments—and then you are not seeing your child or are struggling to see your child, and you have all the costs if you are seeing your child—that is where the sense of unfairness comes in. Your question was on how we improve the system. I am arguing for fundamental reform. We need to look at how other countries do it, at systems where there is open transparency about your situation. You might not agree with the outcome, but at least you can buy into it. We don’t have a system that is transparent for either the paying parent or the receiving parent. You can build that into the existing system. I think there needs to be recognition of both parents’ income to create a sense of fairness. We also have a perverse incentive baked into the current system where a receiving parent can receive more maintenance if they reduce the contact of the other parent, and that in itself creates conflict. Whenever there is a reduction in contact, there will be suspicion of why that is being done. There are measures you can take to alleviate that. The fundamental problem with the system fuels all these other problems with arrears and enforcement.

Thank you. Turning to Abigail on the same question, you gave the statistics that 24% of paying parents are not paying the amount required. When you said that, it triggered the question in my mind of whether the amount that is set is the correct amount. If it is perhaps too high and the paying parent can’t afford it because the formula is wrong, arguably that impacts the percentage of what is actually paid. Could I get your view on that?

That could be a factor. For it to be quite that high and then higher—I am speculating here, and I am not sure that speculation is helpful—I suggest that is more the case where something is paid rather than nothing at all. It is worth flagging that 75% of payments are made at less than 90%. This money simply is not getting through. Can I turn to some of the broader issues that we hear from parents about fairness? In contrast to what Sam was saying, we hear a lot from receiving parents about the CMS’s real reluctance to use any of the enforcement tools that it has available. When we surveyed parents, six out of 10 parents with care told us that they felt that the service was really reluctant to use any of the powers that it has available. They also report extremely long waiting times for anything to be done after payments are missed and after investigations are completed, and during this time, of course, arrears are accumulating, and accumulated arrears are not good for anyone. Stacked-up debt is very bad for the paying parent, and not receiving the money has an impact on the quality of life of the child in question. As I said before, having to repeatedly chase the CMS and follow up on what is happening adds to the difficulties in these areas. Parents on both sides talk about how difficult this is. On fairness, we also hear from receiving parents how they feel the CMS puts the burden of proof on things like the reported level of income of the paying parent on them rather than on the system to investigate. We know that, at the moment, only earned income is taken into account in the initial calculation, so income from assets such as rental properties, dividends or things like that is not taken into account to begin with. When parents think there is a discrepancy between what is being reported and the life that they know their ex-partner is living, the CMS is very reluctant to investigate and frequently asks receiving parents, “Can you provide proof of your ex-partner’s payslip”? Things like that simply are not appropriate for them to provide. We have heard of really extreme cases where the CMS has asked them for proof of a rental property, to go and get photographic evidence. This was a case where there had been domestic abuse and there was a non-molestation order. The way the CMS seemed to be putting the burden on the receiving parent to provide this proof rather than carrying out investigations itself feels unfair.

Thank you for that context. I am conscious of time, so I will hand back to the Chair. Thank you very much for your contributions.

I will move on to safeguarding now. You will be aware that the Committee has been looking at safeguarding and how the Department as a whole integrates safeguarding into all policy development. Have you noticed a change over the last couple of years in the CMS’s approach to safeguarding for paying and receiving parents?

Before I go into this answer, I want to put economic abuse into a bit of context.

If it is all right, can we look at safeguarding overall?

Yes, it is relevant to safeguarding. Non-payment or irregular payments of child maintenance is recognised as economic abuse and can be criminalised as a controlling or coercive behaviour offence. I think it is important to recognise that there are circumstances where this is recognised as a crime and can be prosecuted. From what we know about this form of abuse, it often happens in a broader context of creating fear and intimidation. It often goes alongside threats of physical and sexual violence and other forms of domestic abuse. It is really important to recognise that, when we talk about domestic abuse using the CMS, it is in the wider context of power and control, and of the real fear and intimidation that survivors face when trying to access the child support that their children are entitled to. We have seen that since the tragic death of Emma Day, who was killed by her abusive ex-partner after trying to access child support payments. The CMS has tried to make some changes to its service, such as introducing mandatory domestic abuse training and proactively trying to identify domestic abuse. We see from survivors who are accessing the service that, while those changes have been made, it is not necessarily filtering down to the ground in what survivors experience when they access the service. We have a number of concerns with how the CMS safeguards survivors. The fee waiver was scrapped, which enabled survivors to avoid the application fee, and that was the point where they could disclose domestic abuse. We have not yet had assurances about whether the service continues proactively to try to identify domestic abuse at the point of entering the service, and therefore tailor the support that the customer experiences through the service. While there has been the introduction of mandatory training, we are still hearing from survivors that the support they are offered is not trauma-informed and is not safe practice. I know that Abigail has already spoken about issues where the burden has been put on them to investigate their abusive ex-partner as part of financial investigations, putting the burden on them, which we know can be dangerous for survivors because they are constantly worried about the repercussions of doing so. For one survivor we work alongside, the investigation found that the abuser had not been making accurate tax disclosures to HMRC. Rather than the CMS reporting that to HMRC, it asked the survivor to report it herself. She didn’t dare to do that because of the risk to her safety and her children’s safety, because she is still having to support child contact, which was putting her and her wider family at risk. The third and final point I want to make is that the system has not been designed with safety in mind. We know the collect and pay service is much safer for survivors, because they don’t have to share their bank details with the perpetrator and they don’t have to report to the CMS if their ex-partner is not making payments, but we find it really difficult for survivors to stay on that service. As soon as an abuser starts to show that they are being compliant, they get put back on direct pay. That is when the payments stop again, and then they have the struggle. Survivors say it is like a continual merry-go-round on and off the collect and pay service. Reforms are needed to make the system safer for survivors.

Thank you. Abigail, do you want to add to that?

Yes, to support what Sara said. Certainly we hear from parents that some changes have been made in recent years, but they have not filtered through into the experience of parents who are using the system. Some of them tell us that their experience when they speak to caseworkers on the phone with CMS, where there is supposed to have been specialist training, at best feels like dealing with a call centre. That was how one parent described it. Worse than that, they had felt shamed by their interactions with the caseworkers and that they were experiencing a conversation with someone holding to outdated stereotypes about abuse. Rather than it being a trauma-informed service, having to deal with the system is part of retraumatising them. I know there are safeguards that are supposed to have been put in place. For example, if you are on direct pay, you can get access to a sort code you can share with your ex-partner so they are not able to trace the area in which you live. We have spoken to parents who were not made aware of this. The systems for identifying who has experienced abuse are not working properly. Our research shows that 77% of parents using the CMS say that they have experienced abuse. I know that there is a specialist team dealing with very complex abuse, but the average experience of the system needs to be trauma-informed and to be working on that basis. One other example I want to share, to bring this to light for you, is of a single parent I spoke to a couple of months ago who has been using the CMS for 16 years. She told us that every single time a communication goes to her ex-partner, she receives a threatening message anonymously on social media. She has no direct contact with him, but every single time something goes through, she receives these messages. I think a really important part of safeguarding in the system is that receiving parents need to know when communications are going out to paying parents, because for those experiencing abuse that is a time that can result in the abuse heightening.

I agree generally with everything that has been said. The National Audit Office—or it might be the DWP—reported that 71% of receiving parents reported they are victims of domestic abuse, and it is 51% for paying parents. That certainly is our experience. We do surveys of paying parents, and they report a very high level of psychological abuse, coercive control and economic abuse, both pre-separation and post-separation. That abuse can often continue through the withholding of a child or other forms of economic abuse. In the child maintenance system, we have reports of people falsely claiming that a payment has not been made when it has been made, reporting arrears to a credit agency and making unaffordable demands for payment. On improving the system from the paying parent’s point of view, a digital tool that makes it easier for people to prove that a payment has been made would help. I am generally in favour, for domestic abuse victims on both sides, of moving to collect and pay because of not having to negotiate the whole time with your ex-partner over finances or whatever. We have people say it was a relief when the Child Maintenance Service said, “I am now the intermediary here. You don’t have to deal with your ex-partner any more”, so that could be improved. Also, on the rolling out of single named caseworkers in cases of domestic abuse, it is important that caseworkers are properly trained to recognise that this happens on both sides. As I said, there is abuse on both sides: receiving and paying parents, non-resident and resident parents. The training needs to be completely balanced and even to make sure that cases on both sides are properly picked up.

Sam, how well does the Child Maintenance Service respond to parents raising affordability challenges? And what improvements, if any, have there been in how it handles the issues?

This is probably my fundamental bugbear in that there have not been improvements on affordability. I am not saying that we should go back to the old CSA, but under that system—and it is important that this is in line with the new definition of compliance that needs to be properly achieved—if you were generally struggling to afford payments, part-payments were accepted, not in saying you were compliant but as an interim measure, because some money going to the child has to be better than no money going to the child. Again, I am not talking about the hardened non-payers. I am talking about those who genuinely cannot afford it. There is a movement to collect and pay and a 20% fee for non-payers. If you can’t pay and then you suddenly have a 20% fee put on top, I can’t see how you will be able to pay it. In those circumstances, there needs to be some graduation in the fee. There needs to be a grace period for moving cases to collect and pay so that people can move to a family-based arrangement where it is possible, but I think there needs to be a general understanding that, fundamentally, this comes back to the calculation. The calculation is producing unaffordable results. The National Audit Office did a survey a couple of years ago, and 46% of the people in the CMS system are below the income tax threshold. They are paying parents who are either earning no money or are not earning enough to pay any tax, and the non-payers are 62%. The fundamental issue of affordability is creating the bulk of the arrears within the CMS system, and I think there needs to be a recognition of that, so more flexibility. I know it has a statutory obligation to go in there and get the money, but the way that the system is set up means that it is not taking into account the affordability issues in the way it should. Of course, there is the value of getting money to the child, but the system is set up so that is not recognising the value of having both parents in a child’s life. That is not being valued in the system because of the issues of not compensating for shared parenting. There needs to be another review of the calculation. I am really disappointed that the Government have decided to make no changes, despite all the criticisms of the calculation. There is no recognition, or minimal recognition, in the current system of scrapping the reduced bands for there to be some kind of self-support allowance at a level where both parents can live in dignity, a percentage above that self-support allowance and a general recognition of the cost to the non-resident parent of trying to stay involved in their child’s life. I think that would solve a lot of the issues of arrears and affordability.

Before I move on to Sara and Abigail, do you think that the CMS has improved how it responds to parents disclosing distress and risk of self-harm or suicide?

I don’t have actual data that I can point to, but I would generally say no. It is not all bad. I don’t want to come here and say it is all bad because, as I said, we have parents who say it is a relief when the CMS steps in, but I think there needs to be more trauma-informed training. To give the context again, we know that the suicide rate among men is horribly high. It is three times higher for separated dads, so we are looking at a very high level of emotional distress among all the other stresses that are involved if you are being denied contact with your child or you are having to go to court. No one willingly goes to court, because of the cost, the trauma and the feeling that the system is against you. It is recognised by the Government that there is not sufficient support for separated dads. The trauma-informed training needs to recognise the trauma that a lot of people on both sides are going through, and I don’t think that is recognised at the moment. We still get reports that the CMS is heavy-handed, that it is difficult to get through, and that is a question of resources. There is a general sense that you are dealing with a state function that is coming down on you, and it is difficult to have a proper conversation with. There has to be a way to build that in on both sides, but it is about proper trauma-informed training.

From our perspective, calculations are not really working for survivors of domestic abuse. At the moment, they rely heavily on the abusive ex-partner disclosing their own income. We see that perpetrators often hide their earnings. They might switch from being employed to self-employed, taking cash in hand if they are self-employed. They might try to hide income by doing salary sacrifice. As Abigail mentioned earlier, there are also other elements of income, particularly rental properties, that are not being taken into account. We know that survivors have to fight to get financial investigations, and quite regularly in financial investigations they find that there is significant income that is being hidden by ex-partners. We have also come across a number of cases where survivors have been told that they are being given a lower rate, that their ex-partner has said they have got no income, that they are not on benefits. That means that, when they are put on the lower rate, enforcement action cannot be taken on arrears and essentially they have to go right to the start of the process to try to get a financial investigation. All the time that this is going on, children are not getting any financial help. I know that Abigail shared shocking statistics from DWP’s collect and pay figures that show that a quarter of parents are paying absolutely no maintenance at all. Going back to what Sam said about the need for trauma-informed training, if the CMS can improve its support for vulnerable customers, that will help receiving parents but also paying parents. Ultimately, at the moment, the reliance on the paying parent making accurate disclosure of their income is not leading to effective outcomes for survivors. There is much more that the service can do. It can work more closely with HMRC and use HMRC data. Other parts of DWP have access to financial information from employers or banks and building societies. There must be a way that the CMS can do financial investigations itself, rely on that data, so it is not down to the survivor to try to advocate for their children to be able to get the child support they should be entitled to, and for the CMS to use existing powers to take that burden away from survivors and ensure that kids can get the child support they deserve.

From our perspective as well, the calculation simply is not working. We were really disappointed to see the wider consultation on that cancelled. I will quickly touch on the calculation and how that takes account of nights spent with the non-resident parent, and how it is very much not working for either parent. We hear from paying parents that it simply is not working for them because it almost provides an incentive for the receiving parent to reduce the number of overnight stays a child has, reducing the contact, and access is a very good thing. On the other hand, we hear from receiving parents that this cannot work for them because an agreement will be reached on the basis that the child will spend 50 or 100 nights a year with the non-resident parent. If the non-resident parent doesn’t stick to that and says, “I am not around this weekend, and I can’t do this night”, it is very tricky to go back and get that changed. It is simply not working for either side at the moment. It is based on very outdated numbers. It is really important that the service is properly resourced so that it can investigate and be curious enough to work out the fully accurate amount of maintenance that is owed so that we don’t have maintenance being chased from parents who can’t afford it. Equally, in those sad cases where parents choose to hide their income to reduce the amount of money that is paid, that needs to be identified and enforcement action taken to make sure that they are paying the appropriate amount towards the cost of raising their child.

Can I finally come back to the point about the response to parents in distress or at risk of self-harm or suicide? What is your response to that? Do you think the Department has moved in that way?

Paying and receiving parents are still telling us that dealing with the Child Maintenance Service is a cause of stress and has a negative impact on their wellbeing. That is data from two years ago.

Similarly, from the survivors’ perspective, they don’t feel that they are getting the support. As Abigail mentioned earlier, it feels like they are interacting with a call centre and there isn’t a real understanding of the harm caused to them by the abuser and the impact that has on their mental health. As I said, improving the system so that there is effective support for vulnerable customers, paying and receiving parents, would be a massive service to survivors because it would mean that they are supported at a time when they are struggling with their mental health.

I think it was a point that Abigail made. Did you say that it is two years since you surveyed the people that you support on the CMS?

Our CMS report was based on a survey of paying and receiving parents in 2024.

How regularly do you do that?

We did it in 2024. We are thinking about our plans for what we do next on this. It is not something that we do routinely, but we are hoping—

It does not take into account the work of the last two years on safeguarding. We just need to understand the context.

It is what we have been hearing from parents since then.

I will hand over to Patrick Hurley very briefly. We are a little bit behind, so if we can try to have more succinct answers, that will be very helpful. Thank you.

And you will have a succinct question. What is coming across very strongly is that the CMS’s processes and procedures seem to be inhuman, formulaic, rules-based and taking insufficient account of the realities of the lives of the people they are dealing with. These are people who either lead chaotic lives or have chaos enforced upon them by their circumstances. I want to tease out from the three of you, if I can, where in the CMS system it might be best to inject some flex or nuance or the ability to be agile in response to people’s chaotic situations. Sam, you mentioned the formulas in different countries. You also mentioned having a single named caseworker for specific complex cases. Are these approaches that might be better suited across the board? Without trying to deal with economic abuse, coercive control or people making anonymous comments online, could injecting flex into the system deal with a lot of these issues at source?

Can I come in on that? I push back slightly against the comment about chaotic lives. I feel that almost all the parents using the system would say there is chaos enforced on them. “Chaotic lives” is not a phrase that we would use to describe most of the parents we are working with. It is not just a “computer says no” approach that is causing the problem. It is also inconsistency. People say that, when they contact the system, they are given one decision. When they contact it again to follow up on how it is going, they are told, “No, that decision wasn’t taken,” or “We haven’t received this information.” It is not just the rules being applied too rigidly; it is inconsistency. We would absolutely support having a single named caseworker. Having to repeat your story again and again is a huge part of the problem. As you are going to ask about communication with the digital portal, I won’t say the things I would like to say on that at this point but I will later.

I am happy to come in from a domestic abuse perspective. Flexibility can be good in certain situations of domestic abuse, but it absolutely needs to be backed up with really clear policies and procedures when you are dealing with complex safeguarding issues. Some of the ideas, and the pilot of having a single named caseworker, can be really effective, but we have to remember that there are high levels of domestic abuse cases in the CMS. We have spoken about Gingerbread’s survey that suggested that about 77% of cases are domestic abuse-related. DWP figures suggest that around 60% of applications were domestic abuse-related because of accessing the fee waiver. DWP needs solid and effective domestic abuse policies and processes, and that should be absolutely at the core, given that the majority of cases in the CMS are domestic abuse-related.

Most of the issues are down to fundamental reform, which I think is what the House of Lords has called for. That unfortunately does not seem to be on the horizon at the moment. On the system we have now, I have talked about flexibility on part-payments. I think it is important that does not militate against the compliance figures, and it should be recognised what is and is not compliant, but there must be a way to have flexibility for the people who are genuinely struggling, which is a very high percentage, by allowing part-payments for a longer period. There are still arrears building up, but part-payments to get some money to the children is better than none. There is also the use of the digital tool. A lot of people say it is complicated, not easy to use and not particularly user-friendly, but if that is a way for people to be able to report that they have made payments so there is no confusion, that can help with the non-payment issue. The main flexibility is the possibility of looking at whether part-payments can be accepted in some form.

Every other country in Europe has some mechanism, on different levels, for taking account of both parents’ income—Spain, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Italy, all the major countries—but the model we should particularly be looking at is Australia and New Zealand. Similar to us, they have an agency-based system. A lot of other countries have a court-based system, which would mean that we go to the courts to have proper transparency, but there are countries out there that have proper sharing, proper looking at both parents’ income, but they also have it through an agency like we have in this country. The best model we should be looking at is an income-shared model like they have in those countries, and they manage to make it work.

I think that is a really important question, and we hear from survivors all the time that they find the service does not have a very deep understanding of domestic abuse, including economic abuse and how abusers will misuse the Child Maintenance Service as a form of control post-separation. Survivors tell us that they have an experience of a system where they are continually having to recount their experiences of domestic abuse to multiple caseworkers, and that in itself is traumatising. Survivors often have to build up the confidence for weeks before they feel that they can make a call and chase up something that has happened under the service. They share that there is a lack of documentation of conversations. Survivors often have to ask for that in writing, follow it up, only to be told by a different caseworker that it is not policy and they can’t do that. Survivors are repeatedly going through the system unsure of what decisions are being made or why they have been made in that way. When they think they are able to move forward to access the support their children are entitled to, they are then told that it is not the policy. It is a mixture. At the moment, while there is mandatory domestic abuse training, we are looking forward to engaging with DWP on that training development to understand how effective it is in supporting CMS colleagues to operationalise their learning.

We don’t quite know whether we would classify it as trauma-informed, but we definitely know from our work with survivors that the training that is being received is not translating into trauma-informed service delivery. There is a question about how effective the training is at enabling that. Going back to a point I made earlier about the system design, we have welcomed the Government’s intention to move from direct pay to collect and pay only, because we think it will help to alleviate some of the issues that others on the panel have shared today about survivors not being burdened with having to report that their ex-partner has not made payments. That will enable the service to monitor enforcement more easily, and it will also enable it to move more quickly in taking enforcement action. We are still waiting for that legislation to be brought forward. We don’t have a date yet. Also, the Government have committed to other reforms of the service, such as introducing secondary legislation that would enable the CMS to administer liability orders without burdening the court system. That would enable it to take enforcement action much more quickly. We know from our experience of working with the financial services sector that when there is some accountability for perpetrators’ actions, a misuse of services, it often results in more compliance. The commitment to introduce a non-compliance fee is really welcome. We see that as encouraging those who are refusing to pay, despite being able to afford it, to make payments to their children.

I will be really brief. I support everything that Sara said, and we are hearing exactly the same things from the parents we work with.

Is this on safeguarding? I have nothing further to add on that.

I don’t have anything further to add on that.

Good morning, everybody. You have mentioned collect and pay on a couple of occasions. What do you think will be needed for the Child Maintenance Service to safely transition to a single-tier system based on collect and pay?

The Government need to make sure that this service is properly resourced. Inevitably there will be an increase in the number of cases that it is dealing with, and we hear from parents that they are interacting with a service that very much gives the impression of being underfunded and struggling to function at the moment. That is before all of the direct pay cases are moved over. We absolutely need to make sure that there are proper resources behind it. The system also needs to work in a way that is efficient. I don’t know if you are going to ask about this later, but I have some things I want to share about the online portal. Would this be the right point to share those remarks?

Yes.

Having the main contact with the service over the phone is an enormous waste of time for parents, and it is really inefficient for the service itself. Someone wrote to us very recently and said that, in the last few months, she spent 22 hours on the phone to the CMS. That is not unusual. I reiterate that it is not unusual, but those are the numbers that have been most recently shared with me about someone’s particular case. There was a time when there was a live chat function on the online portal, and parents told us they liked that and it really helped. At the moment, the limitations of the online portal mean you can’t do really basic things, as Sam said, such as a paying parent logging to show that they have made a payment or a receiving parent saying, “I haven’t received it”. There is no way to do those basic things, and we hear from parents that they would like to do something like the universal credit journal so you can see messages back and forth. That would also help hugely with when parents contact the service and say, “I was last told x, y or z” and then they are told by the caseworker something completely different. We heard an awful story from a parent who got in touch with us. An investigation was started. She was told about it, but she was told, “You won’t hear from us for quite a long time while we conduct an investigation. Don’t get in touch, we’ll be getting on with it.” Eventually it had been about a year, so she got in touch and asked how it was progressing. They said, “The investigation? Oh, we haven’t started it. Sorry, we forgot.” She lost a year of progress and a year of not receiving anything. We are sharing examples like this that feel shocking, but we do not have to dig deep to find them. They are not unusual outliers. These are very common experiences.

On the proposed reforms to the service that would move it to collect and pay only, from our perspective it is important that the CMS identifies the domestic abuse cases within its caseload so that we can make sure that survivors are being supported through the transition from direct pay to collect and pay, once those reforms are introduced. We already see that abusers try to force survivors into making family-based arrangements because if they are managing it privately, they know there will be no accountability if they don’t pay. It is absolutely critical that there is an automatic transition from direct pay to collect and pay so that there is not the risk of an abusive ex-partner pressuring a survivor to leave the service entirely. We welcome the proposals to reduce the fees that will be charged to access the collect and pay service. We know from our work with survivors that they are often fearful of accessing it at the moment because of the fees that are charged to the paying parent of 20%. They are scared of the repercussions of that fee being put on the abusive ex-partner. While we welcome the reduction, we think the service should be free at the point of use, so no fees for those who are accessing it. As I shared earlier, we welcome a non-compliance fee for those who are not paying the child support that they should be. Following on from what Abigail said, it will be critical that the CMS properly resources the transition and ensures that its caseworkers receive specialist training to enable them to support survivors with the transition to the collect and pay service. We know that at the moment, when ex-partners are making payments on collect and pay, they are being pushed on to direct pay or family-based arrangements. We want to have a guarantee that survivors will not be forced out of the service when there is a history of compliance so that they can continue to access it. It is so important for their safety to be able to access the CMS. Finally, we need more reforms to the service for enforcement, because it is broken at the moment. Very few cases go to enforcement, even though there is a history of non-payment. Also we see loopholes within the system whereby abusers are able to appeal without any evidence for why they are making an appeal. They might make token payments to avoid enforcement action. Survivors have told us that the CMS just drops enforcement action when a token payment has been made and says, “Well, at least you are getting something,” when actually they have tens of thousands of pounds in arrears stacked up. We want to see the CMS using its existing enforcement powers, because it has quite a lot of power at its disposal, but also introduce the reform to liability orders.

There are probably three things that are needed. There should be a six-month handover period so that the people on direct pay have the ability to review their circumstances, review their capacity. Where they are safe to move to a family-based arrangement, there needs to be support from CMS to give help and support to move to family-based arrangements. When moving over to collect and pay, enforcement needs to be focused on refusal to pay rather than inability to pay. There needs to be a grace period. If there are any underpayments on the direct pay system, there needs to be a grace period before you go into the enforcement regime for collect and pay. Broadly, I support it, but there needs to be some mechanism in place to make that safe transition.

Please can we have really succinct answers? We are on the cusp of when we need to finish.

I get approached by people on both sides of the equation. It feels like the good-faith actors are being penalised and the bad-faith actors are winning. On both sides of the fence, it is very disappointing. Turning specifically to enforcement, Abigail, do you think that the CMS has sufficient enforcement powers? Does it need more? Does it have the powers but is not using them properly? Do we have an understanding of what compliance actually means?

The CMS has pretty good enforcement tools at its disposal. They are just not being used often enough or appropriately. I think better use of existing powers is the first step that needs to happen. On the question of compliance, we have been getting slightly conflicting information in different places on what counts as compliance, such as whether it is paying something at all. The Government’s published figures, which I touched on before, show whether there was no payment at all, a payment of up to 90% or a payment of 90% and above. I don’t know if they collect the data in more granularity, and I don’t know if they count compliance as simply paying something or paying over 90%. There doesn’t seem to be any measure for paying everything that is owed and on time, which is what the average person would say is compliant. It is a big grey area at the moment. When the Minister spoke on this in the Westminster Hall debate in March, the Hansard report said 74% compliance. That was 74% paying something, so it could be an extremely low amount. Clarity around compliance from the Government would be really welcome.

Sara, you answered this previously, so I will skip to Sam.

I believe it does have the powers, but it is not using them. I have made this point. If you compare the powers on non-payment of child maintenance with the complete lack of powers on breaching a contact order, I think it needs to be put in that context. There is an issue when arrears are building up due to CMS errors. Enforcement should be paused while there is a complaint. There was a BBC report a few weeks ago about arrears building up purely because of errors in the CMS, miscalculations and the rest of it. I think in those circumstances there needs to be a pause to arrears and to enforcement action, which is not there at the moment. Generally, it does have enforcement powers. They are just not being used properly.

How well, do you think parents understand how decisions are made by the CMS, the expectations on them and what to do if they need support? Again, two-sentence answers would be very helpful.

General confusion. When you are using the tool, a lot of people are confused about which income year is being assessed and how the calculation is arrived at. There needs to be recognition that, for a lot of people, especially if they are not as digitally able, it is generally confusing. There could be improvements there.

Is there anything that you would recommend that they should do?

Generally?

Specifically about communication.

There is a move to digital, which I generally support, but there needs to be a recognition that a lot of neurodivergent people in very stressful and vulnerable circumstances need to have other pathways open to them—post, phone.

I have touched on a lot of this earlier, so I will keep it brief. I totally agree that, at the moment, it is a really confusing system. Survivors often don’t understand or are not given explanations for why decisions have been made, so it makes it difficult for them to know what their next steps are or how they can take their case forward. We also know that the complaints system is incredibly lengthy. Some survivors go through the process and it takes years, and we see that in the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s figures.

You would support a named caseworker?

Yes, absolutely.

You mentioned you support the digital work.

Yes, we do.

We absolutely support named caseworkers too, because this is really important. A properly functioning, interactive digital portal would help and also communications to parents, in essence like a good exam answer, showing the working when parents are told about a calculation. That is not just showing the amount due but how the calculation has been applied. The opacity around that does not help matters, so that would help bring clarity to it all.

That concludes all our questions for this wonderful panel. Thank you so much.