Child Maintenance Service statistics: data to December 2019, Great Britain
Published 25 March 2020
Applies to England, Scotland and Wales
© Crown copyright 2020
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/child-maintenance-service-statistics-data-to-december-2019-experimental/child-maintenance-service-statistics-data-to-december-2019-great-britain
The latest release of these statistics can be found in the collection of Child Maintenance Service statistics.
This release of Child Maintenance Service statistics has data between January 2015 and December 2019. The release includes revisions to previously published statistics.
1. Introduction
The Child Maintenance Service was introduced in December 2012 as part of the government’s Child Maintenance reforms. It replaced the Child Support Agency (CSA) and is for separated parents who cannot arrange child maintenance between themselves.
Direct Pay is where the Child Maintenance Service calculates the amount of maintenance to be paid and parents arrange the payments between themselves.
If parents cannot do this or they do not pay what was agreed, then the Child Maintenance Service can collect and manage the payments between the parents. This is the Collect and Pay service.
The Child Maintenance Service has a range of enforcement actions it can use if the paying parent refuses to pay their child maintenance.
2. Main stories
Figure 1: 723,500 children are covered by Child Maintenance Service arrangements
Source: Child Maintenance Service statistics data to December 2019, national tables, table 6.
There are:
- 466,500 children covered through Direct Pay arrangements
- 255,300 children covered through the Collect and Pay Service
- 1,700 children not yet assigned to a service (not shown in chart)
The number of children covered by the Direct Pay service has fallen marginally since the previous quarter.
Figure 2: Compliance on the Collect and Pay service is at 68%
Source: Child Maintenance Service statistics data to December 2019, national tables, table 9.
68% of parents due to pay child maintenance through the Collect and Pay service paid some maintenance in the quarter ending December 2019.
The Collect & Pay service is largely composed of individuals that transferred from the Direct Pay service, after failing to pay their liabilities.
The high rate of improvement in this metric observed throughout 2018 has slowed down.
3. What you need to know
Child maintenance is financial support between separated parents to help with the everyday costs of looking after children.
If they agree, separated parents can arrange child maintenance themselves. This is called a ‘family-based arrangement’ and is a private way to sort out child maintenance. Parents arrange everything themselves and no-one else has to be involved.
The Child Maintenance Service which replaced the Child Support Agency (CSA) is for when parents cannot agree to a family-based arrangement. Parents wishing to use the Child Maintenance Service must first contact Child Maintenance Options (CM Options).
CM Options is a free service that provides impartial information and support to help separated parents make decisions about their child maintenance arrangements.
Figure 3: Outcomes of calls made to CM Options between November 2018 and January 2019
Source: Child maintenance arrangements made after speaking to CM Options August 2019, table 1.1.
Read information on child maintenance arrangements made after speaking to CM Options.
Definitions
Receiving parent
The receiving parent has the main day-to-day care of the children and receives the child maintenance.
Paying parent
The paying parent does not have the main day-to-day care of the children and pays child maintenance.
Children covered
Children covered is the number of children for whom the paying parent has a child maintenance arrangement.
Compliance
Compliance is where parents using the Collect and Pay service have paid some child maintenance in the last 3 months.
See the Background information document for more details.
4. Applications to the Child Maintenance Service
Parents who want to apply to the Child Maintenance Service must pay a £20 application fee. Parents do not have to pay this if they:
- have been a victim of domestic abuse
- have witnessed the abuse of their child
- are under 19 years of age
Some applications to the Child Maintenance Service are from: parents who previously had an arrangement with the Child Support Agency. All Child Support Agency cases with an ongoing liability were closed by December 2018, and parents were encouraged to make a new family-based arrangement or an arrangement through the Child Maintenance Service. However, the Child Maintenance Service may still receive applications from such parents, as they may have had a family-based arrangement in the interim.
Figure 4: The number of new arrangements joining the Child Maintenance Service continues to decline
Source: Child Maintenance Service statistics data to December 2019, national tables, table 3.
In 2019, the rate of applications joining the service continued to decline in line with the downward trend. In the last quarter, ending December 2019, 16, 900 new arrangements joined the Child Maintenance Service.
At the end of December 2019, the Child Maintenance Service was managing 506,000 arrangements for 475,000 paying parents. This is a 9% increase to the number of arrangements since the end of December 2018.
See tables 1 to 4 of the national tables for more information.
5. Composition of cases on the Child Maintenance Service
When a parent makes an application to the Child Maintenance Service, they will be told how much child maintenance should be paid.
Some parents will then arrange the payments between themselves: this service is known as Direct Pay. Parents are issued a text message 3 months after they set up a Direct Pay arrangement, and at each annual review, to check that the arrangement is still meeting their requirements.
If parents cannot arrange payments between themselves, or if the paying parent does not keep up with the payments, the receiving parent can ask the Child Maintenance Service to switch the case to the Collect and Pay service.
This service collects and manages payments between the parents, including recovery of unpaid maintenance that built up under the Direct Pay service.
This could involve the use of enforcement powers. To use the Collect and Pay service, paying parents are charged 20% of their child maintenance, and receiving parents 4%. This is intended to encourage parents to collaborate.
Figure 5: Flow of arrangements on the Child Maintenance Service during the quarter ending December 2019
Source: Child Maintenance Service statistics data to December 2019, national tables, table 5.
Each box on Figure 5 shows the number, and percentage, of arrangements using that service type at the end of the quarter. Arrangements may not be assigned to a service type for a short period following application.
Percentages may not sum to 100% due to rounding. Arrows represent the number of cases that moved between service types during the quarter. The largest flows (over 5,000 cases) are in bold. Some smaller flows are excluded from this diagram, but can be found in table 5 of the national tables.
Figure 5 shows:
- most new applicants choose to start on Direct Pay: 14,700 new applicants joined Direct Pay during the quarter ending December 2019
- 63% of all Child Maintenance Service arrangements use Direct Pay, with 37% using Collect and Pay
- more parents move from Direct Pay to Collect and Pay than the other way around: 10,100 parents switched to Collect and Pay during this quarter
- more arrangements joined the service than left: the number of arrangements increased by 4,900 during this quarter
See tables 4 and 5 of the national tables for more information.
6. Children covered by the Child Maintenance Service
Figure 6: Children covered by Child Maintenance Service arrangements, December 2017 to December 2019
Source: Child Maintenance Service statistics data to December 2019, national tables, table 6.
For presentational reasons, a small number of children, who are covered by arrangements not assigned to a service type, have been excluded from this chart. The chart includes at least 98% of children covered by the Child Maintenance Service for all calendar quarters shown.
At the end of December 2019:
- 466,500 children were covered by 319,600 Direct Pay arrangements
- 255,300 children were covered by 184,900 arrangements through the Collect and Pay service
- 147,400 of these children were covered by 103,600 Collect and Pay arrangements where the paying parent paid some maintenance during the quarter
64% of all children covered by Child Maintenance Service are covered through Direct Pay arrangements, with 20% covered by Collect and Pay arrangements for which some maintenance was paid in the quarter. These proportions have changed little over the last 12 months (66% and 19% respectively in December 2018).
For the first time, the number of children covered by the Direct Pay service has fallen marginally compared to the previous quarter.
See table 6 of the national tables for more information.
7. Paying Parents and the Collect and Pay service
This includes paying parents transferred from the Direct Pay service because they have failed to keep up with payments.
Figure 7: Compliance rate of paying parents due to pay maintenance through the Collect and Pay service, quarters ending December 2017 to December 2019
Source: Child Maintenance Service statistics data to December 2019, national tables, table 9.
In the quarter ending December 2019, 98,900 paying parents cleared some of their child maintenance through the Collect and Pay service. This was 68% of all paying parents due to pay child maintenance through the Collect & Pay service in that quarter. The previous rate of improvement in this metric that, was observed throughout 2018 has slowed down.
See tables 6 and 9 of the national tables for more information.
8. Child Maintenance due and paid
The Child Maintenance Service monitors payments made through the Collect and Pay service and can take enforcement action where necessary.
Parents on Direct Pay with unpaid maintenance owed will first have to transfer to Collect and Pay before the Child Maintenance Service can take any action. This means the Collect and Pay service consists of a subset of paying parents who are less likely to pay.
Figure 8: Child Maintenance due and paid each quarter, quarters ending December 2017 to December 2019
Source: Child Maintenance Service statistics data to December 2019, national tables, table 10.
As a result of problems with data feeds, the figures in this chart for the quarter ending December 2018 are estimates. More detail about this is available in the Background information document.
During the quarter ending December 2019, £258.8 million Child Maintenance was due to be paid.
£238.9 million was paid through the Collect and Pay service or due to be paid through Direct Pay arrangements:
- £194.8 million due to be paid through Direct Pay arrangements
- £44.1 million paid through the Collect and Pay service
Over the long term, the amount of money due to be paid through the Child Maintenance Service has been rising as the number of parents using the service has increased. However, the amount of money due to be paid this quarter is marginally less than last quarter.
£19.9 million of maintenance due to be paid through the Collect and Pay service in the quarter ending December 2019 was not paid. This is largely unchanged compared to the same period in 2018 (£20.1 million), despite the increase in the total amount of maintenance due.
Since 2012, when the Child Maintenance Service began, £335.3 million in unpaid maintenance is owed through the Collect and Pay service. This amounts to 10% of all maintenance due to be paid since the start of the service and includes unpaid maintenance transferred from Direct Pay to Collect and Pay.
See tables 10 and 11 of the national tables for more information.
9. Enforcement
When a payment is missed, the Child Maintenance Service contacts the paying parent to arrange a recovery of what is owed or to make clear the actions that may be pursued in the absence of a payment.
For parents on Collect and Pay, enforcement is automatically pursued on their behalf.
For parents on Direct Pay (where the receiving parent asks the Child Maintenance Service to take action) the arrangement is first switched to the Collect and Pay service before any enforcement action can commence.
The Child Maintenance Service can collect unpaid child maintenance in 3 major ways:
-
deduction from earnings order or request – money is recovered from the paying parent’s earnings via their employer, who will be instructed on the amount to deduct
-
deduction order – money is deducted directly from the paying parent’s bank or building society account
-
courts – a paying parent can be taken to court over unpaid maintenance
The courts can grant liability orders, which allow further action to be taken, such as referral to enforcement agents, who can seize goods and sell them to cover any unpaid maintenance and costs.
Where the paying parent is a homeowner, courts may grant a charging order against the property, which prevents any sale without repayment of the outstanding amount.
Ultimately, the court may grant an order for sale which forces the sale of the property. If these methods are unsuccessful, the Child Maintenance Service may apply for the courts to:
- disqualify the parent from holding or obtaining a driving licence
- disqualify the parent from holding or obtaining a passport
- send the parent to prison
Figure 9: Enforcement actions taking place, quarters ending December 2017 to December 2019
Source: Child Maintenance Service statistics data to December 2019, national tables, table 12.1.
At the end of December 2019:
- 50,200 deductions from earnings orders and requests were in place
- 3,500 liability orders were in process
- 5,300 enforcement agent referrals were in process
- 3,800 regular and lump sum deduction orders were in process
The fall in the number of liability orders in process this year may partly be due to the extended timeframe required to apply a liability order to arrears that have been transitioned to the Child Maintenance Service from the Child Support Agency.
From the quarter ending June 2019, the Child Maintenance Service will have confirmed the receiving parent wants such debt to be collected before applying for a liability order. This will also impact the number of Enforcement Agent referrals, as a liability order must be obtained before taking this action.
See tables 12.1 and 12.2 of the national tables for more information.
10. About these statistics
Comparisons
Comparisons between these statistics on the Child Maintenance Service and statistics on the Child Support Agency should not be made as the 2 services have different aims and cover different groups.
The government’s changes to the child maintenance system in 2012 were designed to encourage parents to work together to provide for their children. Child Maintenance Options was created to support parents to set up collaborative, family-based arrangement. The Child Maintenance Service was intended for those parents who cannot make family-based arrangements.
Rounding
Figures contained within this publication are rounded to the nearest hundred, percent, or £100,000. Percentages are calculated prior to rounding.
These statistics have been developed using guidelines set out by the UK Statistics Authority.
Changes made to this publication
A couple of methodological issues have been identified and corrected relating to the way Children and Shared Care counts were calculated. Figures reported in earlier publications have undergone small revisions. This affects table 6 (“Children covered by the Child Maintenance Service”) and table 7 (“Shared Care”) only.
More detail about this is available in the footnotes to the relevant tables and in the Background information document.
Table 12.2 (“Enforcement Actions - Detail on Sanctions”) has been introduced to meet user demand on further detail around sanction outcomes. This table includes outcomes ordered by the court for number of prison sentences, driving licence confiscations, and passport confiscations, including where suspended sentences have been applied.
We are seeking user feedback on this table. Send comments to: [email protected].
Planned changes
We are working on making Child Maintenance Service data available to access interactively on the Department for Work and Pensions interactive Stat-Xplore tool.
Where to find out more
Read previous releases of these statistics.
Read information and statistics on family-based arrangements.
Authors: James Kerr and Amy Grant
Lead statistician: Juwaria Rahman
Feedback is welcome, send comments to: [email protected].
ISBN: 978-1-78659-208-8