Third of parents fail in child support payments

Newly-released figures from the Department of Work and Pensions show that nearly 40 per cent of parents in the area covered by Shropshire Council failed to fully comply with payments in the first three months of the year.

In the area covered by Telford & Wrekin Council the figure was 35 per cent, and in Powys it was 40.5 per cent.

The figures show that of those due to pay support through the Child Maintenance Service in Shropshire about 310 partially complied.

In Telford the number was 290 and in Powys it was 120.

Numbers provided by the government are rounded to the nearest ten, but the DWP says that 39.8 per cent in Shropshire failed to make their full payments between January and March this year, with 35 per cent in Telford, and 40.5 per cent in Powys.

At the start of this year, the best performance was in the Shetland Islands, Scotland, where only 24.1 per cent of parents failed to pay. The poorest record was in Rutland, East Midlands, where 55.3 per cent of parents did not meet their obligations to their children.

Arrange

This payment service, called Collect & Pay, is part of the Child Maintenance Service (CMS)).

The Child Maintenance Service can calculate the amount of child support to be paid and parents can arrange the payments between themselves – a mechanism called Direct Pay.

In cases where parents cannot do this or there is a disagreement about payment, the Collect & Pay service can collect and manage the payments between the parents.

The CMS can take money from a parent’s earnings or their bank account if they try to avoid payments, or take a parent to court.

The charity for single-parent families, Gingerbread, said the latest figures are “worryingly high”.

Sumi Rabindrakumar, Research Officer at Gingerbread, said: “Child maintenance alone lifts a fifth of low-income single parent families out of poverty. But sadly, we regularly hear from single parents whose children are not receiving the support they are owed even when using the Collect & Pay service.

"With a £200 million child maintenance debt already built up under this specific service there’s a real danger of the government repeating the failings of the previous Child Support Agency unless they act now.”