What happened?

The Child Support Agency (CSA) has taken the unprecedented action of writing off the debt of556,100 cases with non-paying historical debt. All debts stored in both the CSA and Child Maintenance System (CMS) will be wiped.

What does this mean?

Child maintenance is provided by the parent who is not the primary carer of the child, to the parent with primary care. The purpose of child maintenance is to, provide finical support for everyday costs of caring for a child under 16 or in some cases until the child is 20.

The CSA has contacted 209,700 parents who have primary in regard to making a final attempt to collect outstanding child maintenance debt before it is wiped off.145,700 cases were on the CMS IT system had a total value of £1,850 million in debt owed. 40% of the cases stored in the system records showed debt that was owed to government with a total value of £200.7 million.

The number of cases held on Child Support Agency or Child Maintenance Service IT systems decreased from 140,200 in December 2019 to 97,700 in March 2020, this is a result of the child maintenance compliance and arrears strategy, which aims to improve the calculation and collection of child maintenance payments.

Usually when a debt arises the CMS may negotiate a repayment schedule. They aim to collect all the arrears within two years and can ask you pay up to 40 per cent of the paying parents income, depending on their circumstances.

Child maintenance debt is usually written off when:

· The debt has already been paid, or it was created in error.

· The primary care parent has told CMS they do not want this debt or did not respond to the representation letter.

· It would cost more to collect the debt than it is worth, or it has been deemed uncollectable.

A number of solicitors have reported being in disagreement with this unprecedented action, highlighting a number of difficulties which may arise from this such as, creating difficulty collecting future child maintenance payments.

A member of the Department for Work and Pensions stated,“our focus is to collect money that’s owed to children who will benefit today ensuring they have the best start in life.” And continued to explain, “70 percent of Child Maintenance due in the Collect & Pay service successfully collected in the three months to March – up from 50 per cent in 2016.”