26
Public Services Committee
Corrected oral evidence: Child maintenance
Wednesday 25 June 2025
11.05 am
Members present: Baroness Morris of Yardley (The Chair); Lord Bradley; Lord Carter of Coles; Baroness Coffey; Lord Laming; Lord Mott; Baroness Pidgeon; Lord Prentis of Leeds; Lord Shipley.
Evidence Session No. 5 Heard in Public Questions 53 - 65
Witnesses
I: Baroness Sherlock OBE, Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (DWP); Duncan Gilchrist, Deputy Director of Child Maintenance, Policy, DWP; Chris Smith, Deputy Director of Child Maintenance, Operations, DWP; Simon Hunter, Director, Child Maintenance Service, DWP.
Baroness Sherlock, Duncan Gilchrist, Chris Smith and Simon Hunter.
Q53 The Chair: Welcome to this meeting of the Public Services Committee and its inquiry into the Child Maintenance Service. We are very pleased to have the Minister of State, Baroness Sherlock, with us today. Thank you for coming, Minister. We look forward to being able to discuss with you some of the issues that have been raised during our inquiry. We also have three officials, who the Minister may refer to for detailed information.
I suppose some of us, such as me, are old enough to remember the original iteration of the CMS. The purpose of the present organisation and its predecessors has changed over time. Very quickly and reasonably succinctly, what do you think the purpose of the current Child Maintenance Service is?
Baroness Sherlock: Thank you for the opportunity to be here, and thank you to the committee for taking an interest in the Child Maintenance Service. It is incredibly important, but it is quite a quiet corner of the department, so it is a real joy to be here, and thank you for your interest.
I see the main role of the Child Maintenance Service as being there to improve outcomes for children from separated families, specifically by facilitating payments between separated parents as quickly and efficiently as possible, and, crucially, without causing any further harm within the separated family, to ensure children receive effective support from both parents. That is a slightly long-winded way of saying that our job is to get money to kids.
The Chair: Would you be happy if you did yourself out of business so that there was no longer a need for the service?
Baroness Sherlock: In an ideal world, yes, but a lot would have happened to the world for that to be possible. I am old enough not just to remember the start of the CMS, but to remember when the CSA, its predecessor, was set up. The reason it was set up then is that the only option at that point for parents to get maintenance for children was the lengthy and expensive process of going to court. Then they would have to go back to court every time anything changed.
In a perfect world, parents would agree everything between themselves and it would all be sorted. Setting up a statutory system was a recognition that that was not the case then, it is not the case now and the research we have done suggests it is unlikely any time soon that a clear majority of parents, never mind all parents, would be able to negotiate these things between themselves.
The final bit to say is that we know, because this is the point at which parents come to us, that the point at which you have to sort out child maintenance is often the worst possible point. It is the low point in the relationship. The relationship has just fallen apart. People are at the awful point. They then have to do the difficult stuff. Even if there comes a point later where they may be able to do that, they may not be at the start. We know that because, frankly, our staff see people at often one of the toughest times in their lives. Ideally one day, yes, but it may be up there with world peace and an end to world hunger. Do not quote me on that.
The Chair: It will definitely not be within 24 hours. It is quite interesting looking at the survey results. This is about children and you always deal with parents. That is inevitable; that has to be the case. I was wondering whether, in your mind, there were any principles that underpinned the work of your bit of the department. When this all started, there was a great moral debate about who should pay. Luckily, we have got over that. Do you now see it as straight administrative, or are there some values in terms of your views of parents, children and what happens when that little family group does not get on together?
Baroness Sherlock: That is a really great question. Often these things either have not been articulated or have been implicit. Sometimes, over the years, there have been multiple objectives layered on top of each other. When the CSA began, there was something of a moral panic about there being single parents, people having children, “Where are the men?”, “Everyone should pay”, et cetera.
I will say from the start that parents should support their children if they are in a position to do so. You may leave your partner; you do not get to leave your kids. I want to say that clearly. I also start from the assumption that most parents want to continue to support their children, and our primary job is to make it possible for that to happen in as easy and straightforward a way as possible.
Any service has to make decisions on priorities, so the Government have some guiding principles. Our guiding principles are to ensure that parents support their children wherever possible and that we support them in doing that in the way that is most appropriate for that family. For many families, they will be able to do that themselves. Some may be unable or it may be inappropriate. There may be some abuse within the family and it would not be appropriate, never mind possible, for the family to do it internally. Sometimes they need the support of the statutory service.
The final level for the Government is that it is also important that we use this as a mechanism to help tackle child poverty. This Government have a real commitment to tackling child poverty. Child maintenance will only ever be a small part of that, but already a significant number—around 120,000—of children are kept out of low income every year as a result of child maintenance. I am sure that we will come on to the reforms we are making, but we estimate that we will increase that still further. For us, that is another priority. We support families and make it possible for them to do it, try not to make things worse, try to make things better and, where possible, use the system to tackle child poverty.
Q54 Baroness Coffey: There is a very high level of non-compliance in collect and pay. I know that the Government are using extensively the fact that 68% paid some maintenance. That is in terms of arrangements, but, in terms of children, 44% of children did not get a single penny. In your letter to us, Minister, you have said that the success is about the number of parents who can pay some of that. Should the success rate not be how many children get money?
Baroness Sherlock: It is. The figures are relatively similar. The new national official statistics came out just yesterday, and they showed that collect and pay has a 69% compliance rate. If you think about collect and pay, when the previous Government did the reforms in 2012, it decided that most parents should be supported to make their own arrangements in what is called a family-based arrangement. If you did not want to do that, you could come to the CMS and it would help you work out the amount of money, but then you had to pay each other. Only if you tried that and you could show that it had failed were you allowed to enter collect and pay. You can imagine that the caseload inside collect and pay is going to be those cases that have already broken down elsewhere.
For example, in the last quarter, the new statistics tell us that almost 15,000 cases transferred from direct pay to collect and pay. Previously, it had been around 1,000 a week. That is the highest that has ever transferred, so we know we have an issue. The cases coming into collect and pay are already the tougher cases. Despite that, we have a significant success rate.
I know that you picked a stat out of Stat-Xplore that looked at the total payment rate for families with children, but we prioritise cases where there are children still at home in the family. There are some cases where there are arrears only. We will get through them in the end, but we prioritise putting money to families with children. We actually have a very high success rate on that. A 69% success rate for what are, by definition, the toughest cases is really helpful. I hope that the committee would recognise that.
Baroness Coffey: I have not had the chance to go through the data, but, as of the end of December 2024, 45.6% of collect and pay arrangements paid 90% or more. That means that more than half either got nothing or got less than, I think, the different rates. We can argue stats for a long time and it is not my intention to get into that.
I am concerned about one of the questions that I think clerks followed up on. In the original process, we have been seeing paying arrangements that, one way or another, increase over time. There is a strong assertion in the consultation, which I know was put out by Conservative Ministers. The committee knows that I had already been through this with officials when I was at the department and rejected the changes proposed. I wanted to get an understanding on the assertion that, simply by moving everybody to have to be on this collect and pay arrangement, the number of arrangements would go up. I was hoping to find out from officials on what basis they had made that assertion, but I appreciate that that is not what has been addressed in the response in your letter.
Baroness Sherlock: One argument for this reform is that we expect the number of arrangements to go up.
Baroness Coffey: They are going up anyway. I was trying to understand the methodology of how you know that moving to collect and pay will be a driver.
Baroness Sherlock: We will monitor. We will be monitoring arrangements, as we have always done. We have done research. There has often been an assumption that direct pay was working brilliantly, because people were doing their own thing and therefore it must be going well, and so all the attention is on collect and pay, where the hard cases are. When we actually did some research into people with direct pay, it became really clear that it was not working very well. People were not getting the money they were entitled to and, moreover, parents were reporting mis-payments, stop-start and all kinds of ways that were not effective.
If you think about those almost 15,000 cases last quarter that went from direct pay to collect and pay, many of those will bring with them arrears that we know about, which we will then have to chase. We could not chase the mis-payments before because we did not know about them. We discovered in the research that parents were not telling us, for all kinds of reasons. They may not have wanted to antagonise the other parent. They were maybe even told it was going to start again. They held on. For whatever reason, we did not know about it.
Baroness Coffey: I notice that you have still not answered the question.
Baroness Sherlock: I am sorry. Could I stop you? Could you spell out exactly what the question is you want me to answer, because I am a little confused? Do say it again.
Baroness Coffey: The number of paying arrangements has been increasing anyway. The assertion made for one of the reasons to move all of this is that this will increase the number of paying arrangements. A previous official started to say that there were aspects in the methodology. When I asked for follow-up detail on that, we did not get any. What is the change? Why is it that moving to this system, for everybody to have collect and pay, will mean that the number of paying arrangements goes up as a consequence of that? They are going up anyway. I appreciate that you may not have the answer to your fingertips, but I would find it very helpful.
Baroness Sherlock: I hope you will appreciate that our officials have given more information to this committee than I can imagine anyone in my department has ever done before. We have sought to answer every single question. We have sent officials along. We have provided all kinds of documents, including under embargo. We have even done statistical releases to enable you to have all the information out there.
At its simplest, collect and pay has a higher success rate in compliance than direct pay, even though collect and pay has all the hard cases and direct pay cases are those in which the state has no intervention. It is our assumption that the evidence is clear. We know that, when cases move across from direct pay to collect and pay, we work them and get money going to children.
Baroness Coffey: Your own research that you have published in the survey shows that 60% of direct pay payments are paid in full. Your own research says that direct pay people did not feel that the suggested changes were the most important thing to reform. Other things such as calculation and access to information were. I am trying to understand, given that that evidence-based approach is really important. That 60% means, I hope, that something like well over £500 million was paid without an issue last year. Meanwhile, 170,000 children who DWP is responsible for getting the money to did not get a penny. That is why I am concerned about some of these. By the way, 60% is higher than your 45.6%.
Baroness Sherlock: It is up to you, Chair. If Lady Coffey would like to have a debate about methodology, I think we are right and she is wrong. I am very happy to bring my colleague in to talk through that. Would you like to do that now, or would you like to move on?
The Chair: I would sooner not, actually, with respect.
Baroness Sherlock: Right, that is fine.
The Chair: That is just because I do not want to deprive other colleagues.
Baroness Sherlock: I am sorry to say that I simply disagree with the use of the figures we have heard. I will answer the broad point, since it has been made. The evidence that came through in response to the consultation was that direct pay is not working. It is not the only issue. I was delighted to be able to say, in my foreword to the response to the consultation, that we are also planning to review the calculation itself and we will be going out to consultation on that separately.
The reality is that all kinds of things make a difference to how much money changes hands. Is it the right amount of money? Is it felt to be fair? Are we taking all the right kinds of income into account? Can people afford it? As well, there is the mechanism by which we transfer money from one party to another. This is one half of the picture. The other half of the picture is the calculation. We are going to be looking at that. We are reviewing it. I am very happy to discuss it in general terms, but we are going out to consultation on that later.
The Chair: It comes up in a later question, so we will get to it.
Baroness Sherlock: I will look forward to it.
Q55 Lord Shipley: I would find it personally very useful to have a written statement of the methodology. I understand that it would take quite a lot of time now to go into that, but I would find it useful if you are able to provide a written statement as to the methodology.
Baroness Sherlock: If there is anything that has not been supplied that we have, I would be happy to do that. We have been completely transparent about data.
Lord Shipley: That was not my question. My question was about a figure that you gave us from yesterday, which is that, as I understood you, collect and pay is 69% compliant. Could you define, for the record, what the meaning of the word “compliant” is? It is that 69% are compliant. The underlying assumption is that they are 100% compliant in payments, but they are not, are they?
Baroness Sherlock: No, they are not.
Lord Shipley: Could you define what “compliant” means?
Baroness Sherlock: I am going to ask one of my colleagues to define that. Would one of you like to give the definition and explain? It means that they are paying something, but there are often very good reasons why they cannot be 100% compliant. Chris, do you want to explain that?
Chris Smith: I will try to do it quickly and simply. You are quite right, Minister. It means “paid something in quarter”. The reason why we use the “paid something in quarter” methodology is that, as the Minister has already pointed out, we had 14,500 changed service types during the first quarter of this calendar year. All those will become, into that quarter, non-compliant. Therefore, it takes us some period of time to get those customers to a level of compliance where they are paying 100% of their maintenance. Because we have that level of churn, we use an in-quarter “paid something” methodology to reflect the fact that we are getting cases onboarded and paying during that period.
On the other side of all of this, I would draw your attention to the financial recourse that we make when we run the child maintenance scheme, on the basis that you can see that we have now collected and arranged £9.7 billion since the beginning of the scheme, but the amount of money that is actually outstanding still to be collected is just 7% of that overall amount. There is a real relationship between our strive for compliance and the actual amount of money that gets to children. It is not an easy thing, but it is because it takes us such a long time to get cases up and running and compliant, and then reflect it in our statistics.
Baroness Sherlock: Thanks, Chris. Can I add one thing to that? Once we get people into payment, the vast majority—maybe about 72% of those in collect and pay—are in enforcement of some kind. In other words, we are making them pay. Only a minority in collect and pay voluntarily pay. At any point in time, we are deducting money from either the benefits or the wages of 72% of them. We have made orders to get money directly from them. Once we get them into enforcement, we then have a high success rate in getting all the money that comes through, because, if we are deducting the amount of money, provided they have enough money, we will take the full amount in.
As Chris describes, often it is the fact that collect and pay is the place you come into when you have failed elsewhere. It will take time for you to get into compliance. It may be that, after being there for a long time, you eventually get out the other end and go back to an arrangement of direct pay at the moment, but that is quite complicated. It is a complicated picture, but we have spent a long time trying to find the statistics that best reflect what is actually happening inside a really messy, complicated service, where, at any point in time, families are in different stages of complexity, movement and trauma. We think that the figures tell that story, but they need the background to tell it well.
Q56 Lord Mott: Good morning, Minister. Can I move on to enforcement, please? Over 40% of children in families with collect and pay arrangements received no child maintenance in the quarter ending December 2024. What steps are you taking to improve the efficiency of CMS enforcement action?
Baroness Sherlock: Probably the most helpful way to do enforcement is if we start off with the fact that we have 760,000 people in the system, and the collect and pay part of that is 41%, so 310,000 are in collect and pay. Within that, we then move down. Only 220,000 of those actually owe something. Some people will not owe anything, for a variety of reasons we can go into if you want to.
Of those who do, 69%, as I said, are compliant. There are then 31% who are nil compliant, so they do not owe anything at the moment. There are 26,000 who are nil compliant. Sorry, that is a long way to describe this. That leaves us at the end with only 44,000 people remaining who should be paying money and are not paying it.
We then work our way through. This is what is really helpful. I have now worked my way through. We ask you to pay yourself. You do not. You come to us. We then ask you to pay and you do not. We then go to enforcement. We try to take money off your benefit or wages. If that does not work, we can go to court and get money from you. If those do not work, we can go to using enforcement agents, or bailiffs as were. If that does not work, we then can move on to what are called sanctions, so if you really do not pay. For example, we can annex your driving licence or send you to prison.
Only 2% of collect and pay people actually reach the sanction stage, so it is a waterfall that works remarkably well. Each stage takes time. One key steps is that, by the end of this year, we will be implementing mechanisms to allow us, when we are doing liability orders, to do them directly rather than having to go to court every time we do it. That will speed that up significantly. We have looked recently again at the way we use enforcement agents, trying to find ways of speeding that up.
We also now believe that the move to collect and pay will really help, because in collect and pay we know straight away if you have missed a payment. In direct pay, we do not know until it has fallen apart. If we know the minute you missed a payment, we can move into action and start getting you back on track so you do not end up being in a pattern of not paying. We know that, if we can get people into patterns and the minute they stop we step in, we have much better success rates.
You are absolutely right. Those are the things to focus on and I hope that, with all of those, we will begin to get better and better.
Lord Mott: The other thing that has come through quite a lot when we have had evidence from parents is very much around trying to identify the income and assets of those who are self-employed. I am sure that you have heard this many times before. It came through very strongly. It would be good to get your views on what action is being taken to combat that.
Baroness Sherlock: For 90% of the people who come our way it is more straightforward because we can use income from HMRC. If people are on benefits, we know how much they have. If they are in PAYE, we know how much they have. Then it starts to get more complicated. If they are self‑employed, again, it is straightforward. We use their profits, and it is their taxable profits, so we use the information they put into HMRC. If we can get information from HMRC, that is what we are legally obliged to use. As long as they are doing that, that is fine.
There are two different ways in which it can get more complicated. One is where the receiving parent believes they have income they are not telling us about. If that is the case, we encourage them to tell us, but they have to have some evidence. For example, it may be that they see evidence of this. I have seen all kinds of cases, but you will have heard some of them. There has to be evidence of money for us to act. If they see, for example, that somebody’s lifestyle suggests that things are going well, it could be their new partner’s income. It could be something other than that.
We have a financial investigations unit that likes nothing better than to get stuck in and track down money. I have sat down with the agents and they are brilliant. They are people who have not only the skills but the enthusiasm. They want to get money to kids. If people have money, they will find it, and they are really good at this. If they come to us, we can get people to track it down.
Sometimes there are also other kinds of income that are not picked up. It could be income from assets. It could be income from other forms that are not coming through HMRC. Again, if they can come to us, we will look and try to track that down. There have been some really interesting cases. We have been able to find out on occasion that somebody who was declaring next to no income clearly, from their banking statements, had regular money coming in. On occasions, if there is a clear evidence pattern, we can make, and we have made, an assumption that their income is higher and that they must be getting it from a source that has not been declared. We can use that.
Because, of course, it is a legal process and it can be challenged in court, we have to have evidence. We put a lot of work into that. We also go out. Our priority is to get money to children, so we do anything we can to do that. When we come to do the calculation review, that will be an opportunity to make sure we are looking at the right kinds of income, and that all income is in that. At the moment, working from the definitions we have, we use those resources to try to track down where people have—I am just talking at you now. Is that what you were asking, sorry?
Lord Mott: Yes, that is incredibly helpful. Several times in your opening remarks you talked about reducing child poverty and again there getting money to children. As my final question, may I ask for your view, and perhaps the view of the Government at the moment, as to whether you would be open to topping up missing or incomplete payments? Where I am driving to here is whether the Government or you be interested in the Government, in essence, owning the debt. Therefore children would always receive their money. Parents would always be certain they were going to be paid every month. Is that something the Government would consider?
Baroness Sherlock: If I am honest, it is not something that I am tempted by. I can totally understand why. If I were an advocate for single parents, I can certainly see why that is an attractive option. It is really quite difficult for the Government. It would move the Child Maintenance Service into a very different space. I am not sure there are cases worldwide where it has worked and been seen to be really effective. It would also be extremely expensive, but I think it would transform the nature of what we do.
I would want to be persuaded at that point, because, in a sense, you are simply turning it into a form of tax, whereas we are enabling parents to support their own children. Having the money go directly, if we can make that work, is a more effective way to do it. In essence, that is the job of the Child Maintenance Service. It would be doing a very different job if that were the case.
Something like 60% of parents on collect and pay do not earn enough to pay tax. A certain amount of the money that is not being paid is not being paid because they simply cannot afford to pay it or they are just on very low incomes. One challenge to us is to try to make the system work as well as it can, but also to make sure that it is appropriately affordable. That is one of the things I want to look at when we get to the calculation.
I am sorry. On that one, at the moment, there is not a great appetite in Government for a reform of that magnitude, but we are in the market for looking at anything short of that.
Q57 The Chair: I have one little follow-up question to that. Are you in a position, in terms of trends, to almost be able to predict where non‑compliance will come from, or is it so diverse and different, without a pattern, that you do not know? As you take cases in, there is no way of saying, “Look there, there and there, because that is where non‑compliance is likely to happen”.
Baroness Sherlock: That is a very interesting question. One of my colleagues may want to add something in a moment. We know that there are certain patterns. One benefit of having everybody inside collect and pay is that you get the data much earlier, so you have all the early signs of what is and is not working. A lot of data comes through CMS and we are trying to find ways of using data appropriately to identify where there are patterns of likely non-compliance and try to stop them early.
For example, even in direct pay, we text parents, reminding them that they have to pay. We are looking at messages. If you use data well, efficiently and appropriately, you can identify patterns. We want to make it as easy as possible to do the right thing. That is the point of a well-functioning statutory system. We are not interested in hounding people.
We have presenting officers who go to court when they actually take people to court. They have described to me literally getting on the steps of the court, getting out a machine and taking money off people, because, in the end, we do not want to send people to prison. We want to get money to kids. Our job is to design a system that is not trying to persecute people or penalise them, but to make it as easy as possible to do the right thing. If you do not do the right thing, we will come down on you. I do not know whether anyone wants to add anything.
Simon Hunter: I think that I mentioned it in one of our previous sessions, actually. We were one of the first areas to pioneer machine learning or a form of artificial intelligence. This was three years in development and we have been using that now for a couple of months. That gives us the proactive ability to understand the likelihood of a case breaking down and we have seen some really positive early success with that.
That enables us to be on the front foot and be proactive, rather than reactive. We have a team who are working on that. When they see these signs where the case is likely to break down, we can do some outbound calling. We can get in contact with the customer to see whether anything has changed. That has been really positive for us. We want to develop that and use that on as big a scale as we can. I guess that that is an example of where we are trying to identify patterns of non-compliance, be on the front foot and do something proactive in that space.
The Chair: Thanks very much. That is helpful. We will move on to a slightly different question now.
Q58 Lord Laming: Thank you, Minister, for the very helpful information you have sent us. I would like to ask three quick questions, if I may, please. I will try to keep them very brief. The first is about the abolition of direct pay that you have already referred to. Are you sure that it will not cause an increase in the number of families who will have no child maintenance arrangements at all?
Baroness Sherlock: We will find out. We do not believe that it will. If we think of those that are working smoothly at the moment, there is no reason in many of those cases why they could not have an appropriate family-based arrangement. We specifically said that we will increase support to enable families to do that, both to do better communications and to create ways of having a calculator so that they can get an income figure they can rely on and then transfer the money themselves.
The ones that are not working will come to us. We expect those to be more effective arrangements for reasons I articulated, albeit not entirely with consensus, to Lady Coffey a little earlier. We believe that they will be effective. We will monitor that, but we do not see any reason why that should be the case. At any point, either parent can come to the Child Maintenance Service if they want to, so they can always come to collect and pay if they want to do that.
Lord Laming: As I understood it, paragraph 37 in your department’s research indicates that only 16% of receiving parents in direct pay felt confident they would be able to have a family arrangement.
Baroness Sherlock: If that is the case, there can be various reasons for that. One reason may be that they do not trust that they can have an accurate income figure for the other parent. If we could find a way of providing them with an income figure on which both parties could rely, that may pick off some of those cases and they may feel better able to do that.
Alternatively, if they do not, the receiving parent can always come to the Child Maintenance Service and go into collect and pay. They are then going to get a better service, because we will make sure that the money is collected and paid across to the receiving parent. I hope that either way will make it easier for more of them to be able to have family‑based arrangements, but the others will always be able to come to us and have a more reliable service.
Lord Laming: In paragraph 109, it is indicated that the introduction of fees for anyone with a child maintenance arrangement is intended to be an incentive to move people off CMS arrangements on to family-based arrangements. We have heard a lot of evidence that people find family‑based arrangements in times of great stress, as you referred to in your opening comments, which were absolutely right. This is intended as an incentive to get people off. Are you confident that this is going to work in the interests of families?
Baroness Sherlock: I believe that it will, because the fees are small as a percentage. At the moment, if you use collect and pay the receiving parent will pay 4% of the money, which will be deducted, and the paying parent will pay 20% on top of the money. If they are compliant, both parents in collect and pay will pay 2%. Now, 2%, for what is a service that should ensure that, in the vast majority of cases, money is changing hands, is worth while. If parents cannot do that and they choose to make a family-based arrangement, obviously no fees are there, and we will invest in that.
In the end, the state still subsidises the service. Fees contribute towards this, as do other sources of income, but in the end the state still subsidises the service. Parents are getting a service on collect and pay that I hope they will feel is worth a very modest fee, and it will make a difference. In the case of receiving parents, it is taking off money only if the money changes hands. There are no up-front fees. If we did not get any money to you, we are not taking any fees off it. It is only a percentage taken when the money is coming into your bank account. I hope that that will feel like it is worth it for them.
Lord Laming: You will monitor, you said.
Baroness Sherlock: We will monitor. The CMS monitors everything. We are big on that. We monitor things to within an inch of their lives.
Lord Laming: This is my final question. In paragraph 20, you referred to the CMS as having an important role in ensuring that support gets to children of separated families. I wanted to ask you whether it would be more correct to say that financial support, not support generally, gets to families. That raises the issue of whether, at a time of crisis in family life, separating parents and the issues that you described early on very clearly as painful and distressing, it is good that the CMS continues to operate on a very narrow remit, in isolation from the other services? Do you think that more could and should be done to link the CMS with the other family support services?
Baroness Sherlock: It is a great question. Certainly, we should not be operating in isolation from other services. Also, we probably need to be aware of our boundaries, in terms of our own strengths, and not stray into areas that are beyond our expertise. In between that is quite a lot of ground, as you are rightly pointing out, which is about how well different bits of government work together in relation to this.
The CMS works quite closely with other government departments and is increasingly doing so. For example, we work very closely with family justice policy. We are constantly looking for opportunities to integrate services or to identify touchpoints where parents will get in touch with either one, and looking at resources. There is some really good work being done. I am sure that you will be aware that the MoJ, for example, has done a lot of work on mediation. It has a brilliant voucher scheme where parents can be given a voucher for £500 to get mediation at the very point at which they are trying to discuss things such as child contact and child process. We are trying to work with the MoJ.
The challenge is that parents will often say, “If I’m not going to see my kids, I’m not going to pay for them”. I understand how that feels, but that cannot be right. The decision on child contact has to be in the best interests of the child, but both parents still retain a responsibility for the upkeep of their children, whether or not a court or other people have deemed that it is in the interests of the child to spend time with them or however that works out. There will always be different bits of government that have to do different things, because that is what they are for and that is where their skill set is. The really good challenge is to make sure that we join all those up as well as we can.
We have not always done that in the past, in years gone by. We are much better at it now than we used to be. The way that everything is now online and integrated makes it easier to have connection points. For example, we put resources up. An overwhelming majority of parents now apply for child maintenance online, most of them on their phones. The world has changed. When they do that, people can link through to resources of different kinds that can help them. We can also link them straight across to be outside CMS, if that is helpful. That is probably the way forward.
To be honest, this committee has a lot of expertise across that area. If there are areas where you have recommendations about ways in which government do that better, I would be interested to read them, because it is an area that we are still trying to get better. We know that we do not have it absolutely right yet. I would be open to any advice from the committee on ways in which we can improve that.
The Chair: You have given us a good introduction into the next question, actually.
Q59 Lord Shipley: You will be aware that we, as part of this inquiry, talked to both receiving and paying parents in some detail. My abiding memory of that was constant complaints about, first, the amount of time people had to wait to get an answer on the telephone, but then, secondly, having to retell their story time and time again, because the information that for them was relevant was not actually on the screen of the person answering the phone. I wonder whether you can tell us what steps you are taking to improve communication by CMS to both receiving and paying parents.
Baroness Sherlock: That is another great question. The experience you have on telephony will depend entirely on when you phone us. In the last quarter to December 2024, the average time CMS took to answer the phone was 18 minutes, but, if you ring between 9 am and 10 am or on Mondays, you are going to wait a lot longer. Two per cent of people were waiting more than an hour. The telephony data are tracked. I have been asking this a lot, because I get complaints about this from people saying they were waiting a long time.
I know from my own experience if I call places that, if you get through quickly, you do not think about it again. If you wait a long time, it weighs on you and you tell us. If you are one of the people who come at the wrong time, we do not think that is acceptable, so we are investing increasingly to reduce that. We are doing that in different ways.
We have made some changes. For example, late last year we changed call routing. That might sound a bit technical, but it means that, when they call up, more people are sent directly to the team that can deal with the problem, not to some intermediate or generic caseworker. For example, if your case is in arrears, we will try to put you straight through to an arrears team that can deal with your particular problem. I hope they can deal with it, rather than you waiting to talk to us and then being put on and having to be transferred again. That has made a difference.
I mentioned that, increasingly, people are doing things online. We are now at a stage where a growing number of the things people used to ring us about can now be done. Not only can they give us the information online, but the changes can be automated. That means that fewer of them have to phone us. We are going to move more and more in that direction, so the things that can be done automatically are done automatically; the people who can do stuff online can do it online. That means that the staff on the phones are there for those who want to talk to us rather than do it electronically and for those things that you cannot do online because they are really complicated.
It has been interesting. For CMS within DWP, customers will mostly choose to do things electronically if they can. One reason, I suspect, is that our demographic skews young for DWP, because you have kids. If you think of DWP as a whole, the pension lines would have different experiences. This would be at the younger end. People are more used to doing things, and would often choose to do that rather than talk to a human being. I am too old to appreciate this, but this is an established pattern elsewhere.
In terms of telling people your stories, this is really difficult. I have specifically looked into this. You are required to record the details. When someone phones up, a caseworker can see the basics of the case. They can see the last connections you made. One challenge is that a lot of the cases are very complex and it is the nuance that makes the difference. Things change often very rapidly. For the foreseeable future, there will be times when customers will have to tell the story again.
We have instituted really careful quality checks to make sure that caseworkers are writing down all the stuff on the screen, so that the next person to pick this up can see it. As these guys know, I go after them a lot to make sure that we are doing quality checks. We are also listening in to calls to make sure that caseworkers are doing that correctly.
The ways we do it are to maximise people who do not have to call us, to make sure that the staff are available for those who do, to get calls answered as quickly as possible and to make sure that, when you get through, you get through to the right person and at least some of the information will come up. We are getting better at that. Technology will make it easier as it goes.
The next question is, “Can’t I have a single named caseworker? I always have Jane Smith, so Jane Smith knows my case. When I ring up, Jane Smith will always be there”. Realistically, if you think about the number of staff we have and the working patterns, you could not possibly do that. The danger would be that they would never be there at the time you wanted them. The exception is that we have a specialist team for dealing with complex domestic abuse cases, because there we think that it is potentially traumatising for someone to have to recount that. We have put the investment into that. We have looked at it, but it is not practical to do it for all of our 760,000 cases and 1.5 million customers. We could not manage that.
I cannot tell you that it never happens. I would like to think that it is better than it was and that it will keep getting better.
Simon Hunter: On your point around telephony, to give you some confidence—and I know I have referenced this before—we analyse the telephony data significantly. We are constantly trying to make those improvements. We are striving for that average speed of answer to be quicker and that we get to more calls. To give the committee confidence, that is something that we do frequently, in terms of how we can utilise our workforce as optimally as we can.
The very quick second point is around customers having to repeat themselves. I referenced before the technology that we have been using to assess the potential breakdown of accounts. We are looking at a similar kind of thing, which would basically evaluate all of the case history to make it easier for the caseworker to have that information to hand. We are looking at technologies to help with that problem as well. That is just to give that reassurance that, in both of those spaces, there are things that we are looking at to try to get better.
Lord Shipley: That is helpful to a degree. Can I be clearer about the ambition with online recording? We talked about phones being slow to be answered. If you moved increasingly online, you could have an agreed online narrative so that the receiving or paying parent who is inquiring, and the person who is dealing with the case, share the same information. Are your systems able to produce an agreed narrative that all parties have access to, or are things being recorded on the system that you might not want receiving and paying parents to read?
Simon Hunter: The system that the caseworker uses is called Siebel 20.12. That is the CRM platform. All the customer information is within that. Any caseworker, depending on the customer who calls, will be able to see that information. The customer’s online platform is unique to the customer. Sorry, I am not sure I have followed—
Lord Shipley: Do you have shared information?
Baroness Sherlock: What he is trying to suggest is whether it would be possible to reach a stage where you have an agreed narrative. Then the customer could see it. Both customers could see it. You log on and could both see a shared bit. That would be quite challenging for a range of reasons. At the moment, it would be technically challenging anyway. Our systems would not allow it.
There is a bigger challenge in that, as you would be unsurprised to hear, the perspectives and narratives of the two customers for every case do not necessarily agree. They often disagree quite significantly. Sometimes there are reasons why it would not be appropriate for them both to see it, because it would not be safe. That is an interesting question. Can I take that away?
Certainly, we could not at the moment do it technically. I would need to think about whether it would be desirable and whether we could. That is a really interesting thought. At the moment, it is an incredibly complex system, because there are so many variables and they change so much. You can think of all the different moving parts of the calculation, which is about your income, how many children you have, where the other parent lives and all kinds of things that have changed. Any one of those can be challenged by either parent at any time, and sometimes they are repeatedly. There are an awful lot of moving parts. I would like to take that away and have a think about it. That is an interesting question. Thank you for that.
Q60 Lord Bradley: Can I follow up, very briefly, on the domestic abuse cases? We saw that they have dedicated caseworkers, which is welcome. Could you remind me how you identify those cases? Quite often, they are very complex. They do not always naturally present at the first point of contact. Linking it to other information, what connection do you have with other agencies that can facilitate that process of support and help for those particular cases?
Baroness Sherlock: I can, and thank you. That is another really good question. We spend a lot of time and money training our staff. We have been in the process of refreshing training recently. Both new entrants and existing staff have to have that refreshed to help them to make sure that they are understanding what they are hearing, to ask the right questions, and to record it.
There are very significant levels of domestic abuse reported in the system. Indeed, the research that we have done suggests that both parents were reporting high levels of abuse of different kinds. There is not necessarily agreement between the parties, you will understand, as to when there is abuse present, and the nature of the abuse. We have put a lot of work into training our staff, and we are doing work with stakeholders on this. This is a really big part of CMS, because it has been so significant.
For example, even if, at the moment, someone is in direct pay, they need to know that they can advise the parents that there are ways of having bank accounts that cannot be geographically traced if you do not want the other partner to know where you are living, because you do not think that it is safe. We can make sure that the parties never have to engage with each other. None the less, it will be a great deal safer.
One criticism of direct pay was that it had been allowed to be used by abusive non-resident parents as, for example, a form of economic abuse. Parents would deliberately stop and start payments. They would pay a bit and then stop, and it would either be done as a way to draw the other parent into contact or be used inappropriately.
I have made it clear that that is not the sole reason for removing direct pay. However, removing direct pay and moving cases on to collect and pay will make that system a great deal safer and more robust. I have confidence in that.
There is no simple answer to your question, except to say that we invest a lot of time and effort in understanding the nature of abuse, in working with stakeholders, in training our staff, in monitoring our staff, and in trying to make sure that we do this as well as we can.
Q61 Baroness Pidgeon: I just wanted to build on the questions that Lord Shipley was raising. We heard very clearly from parents that they wanted to be able to log on to an online portal and see where you have recorded that you have received their payslip or whatever it is, and what the status is currently, with whatever officer. They wanted to be able to do that 24 hours a day, rather than taking up time when they were working. It seems to me that that is quite a basic system. It is not asking for access to see everything that you have on your system, because, quite clearly, there are going to be issues around confidentiality, but to know where the status of their query is at a time that suits them.
To me, that did not sound like the most sophisticated online system, although you said that you are working with something called 20.12, which is potentially fairly dated now as systems move on. That is the sort of fairly basic system that would mean that you would not have so many people phoning, because they could easily log on and see it. I was wondering whether that is the sort of thing that you might consider.
Baroness Sherlock: Would you mind if I asked a colleague to address that? Chris, could you explain where we are up to on that?
Chris Smith: Yes, of course. We have had some of this conversation previously. We are advancing our online service all the time, but we do it on the basis of where it causes the most challenge for our customers. To your point, where we see things that generate unnecessary contact to us, those are the things that we address first. We are building out this iterative online capability.
In some transactions, we do have exactly what you talk about: “I have uploaded some evidence. Has the evidence been accepted? I will receive an email to confirm that that is done”. A customer can be confident that we are taking that and are working on it.
We also publicise how long someone can expect a transaction to take, so that, when they have raised something on the system, they will have information to hand that says, “I can expect that I will hear something within a week. Therefore, I do not need to call”.
This goes to Lord Shipley’s point about giving consistent information. The next big thing that we are working at on our online services in terms of information is solving the conundrum about the complexity of our payments. People change their jobs. They pay their arrears. They do not pay their arrears. They rack up debt. They do not rack up debt. They overpay. All of this stuff makes it very complicated for the customer to understand, but also for a caseworker to translate when they have just picked up a phone out of the blue.
This year, we are working on—and we are really proud of this—a very digestible and simple one view that both our caseworkers and our customers will be able to see, which summarises, in a similar way to when you see your gas and electricity bills, income and outcome in one space. The reason why we are focusing on that is that we know that that is the thing that generates the greatest level of anxiety and the greatest number of calls.
I will just remind the committee that it is really hard and really complicated, but we are very confident that we will be able to provide that kind of certainty. To your point, Lord Shipley, that would cover off a lot of the challenges that people have about relaying their problem, because they will have a really clear account and view of their situation online.
Simon Hunter: Can I just provide a quick bit of clarity as well? There is a difference between the online portal that the customer uses and the system that caseworkers use. I might have caused a bit of confusion. MCMC—My Child Maintenance Case—is what the customer logs into, and that is what Chris was describing there. Siebel 20.12 is the CRM platform that our caseworkers use. We can iterate and update both, so, while it might sound like an old system, we are developing it all the time. I am sorry if I caused that confusion before in terms of my articulation of it.
Q62 The Chair: One of the things that we have heard most weeks is that the system sounds good, but it is not good for the people for whom it does not work 100%, and the image of the organisation gets a bad name. I am sure that there are a number of people who say, “The CMS never gets it right. It never does the calculations. It never answers the phone”. I am sure that that is not true, but it happens enough for that to become a problem for the service and people’s perception. I accept that we are bound to have talked to the people who have complaints. They are the ones who have answered our consultation in great number.
As you move forward on this, I just want to ask a general question about staffing and what this means for your own department. Do you need different staff, more staff, fewer staff, or staff with different skills? Are you absolutely confident that you have the structure within the department to deliver these changes?
Baroness Sherlock: The simple answer is yes, because part of the transformation is based on a recognition that our staff will have to do different things. One thing that I have been talking with Simon and his colleagues about is knowing that, if increasingly the simple things are done online, the cases that come through on calls are going to be more complex. I have charged them with making sure that not only do we have enough staff to do that, but we have staff who are appropriately trained and able to deal with the kinds of things that come in.
That is an issue for the department as a whole, because that is the direction of travel for DWP and much of Government, and, indeed, for anyone in a customer-responsive business. As the simpler things get done, you increasingly need your staff to do different things and to operate in different ways. That is part of our planning.
Not only do I very often meet with Simon and his colleagues, but, because I hold a responsibility in the department as Minister for staff and generally for HR, I also meet with our HR director and our people person, and I am very much aware that we are getting this right.
Can I just say, Chair, that you have made a really important point? CMS suffers a lot from the history of the statutory Child Maintenance Service. The CSA had such challenges that, somehow, it was decided that it was the British Rail sandwich of government services, and it does not matter what you do after that. People were talking about how terrible things were long after they were not terrible.
Just to be really clear, I am not being complacent. I am not saying that we get everything right; I am not saying that we get everything right for every customer. But honestly, when you look down, the vast majority of these things go through really smoothly. Everything happens. What happens ought to happen. It is all smooth. When it goes wrong, we have to deal with that. We are determined to keep getting better and better, but we also want to try to make our communications better. I want to try to find other ways in which we can help people to understand what the modern Child Maintenance Service is really like.
I also do not want it ever to be an excuse for someone who does not want to pay for their children by saying, “You can just blame the agency”. Really, you do not want to pay for your kids. We need to make sure both that it is a good service and that parents understand that it is a good and effective service, so they can use it, and, therefore, that it is a service that expects them to do what is expected of them and we will come after them if they do not.
All those things need to be true. As I said in my response to the consultation, I also want us to become not just a more effective and efficient service, but a more trusted service. We want to look at ways in which we can find our relationships with parents so that they will trust us to do the job that we have to do. That is a challenge, but it is one that we are taking seriously.
Q63 Lord Carter of Coles: Good morning and welcome, Minister. On the point that you were just making, this committee has become aware of the complexity of what you and your officials have to deal with. In some ways, it is remarkable that it works as well as it does, so we should probably be a bit positive and look at that.
From the evidence that we have received, it seems that the issues break into two. One is process. You are continually trying to refine the process. You are discovering the glitches. You are trying to get the single view of the claimant, or whatever it is, to make that work.
There are also structural issues, which are the ones that I would like to turn to now, particularly the issue of the calculator. We are trying to build a fair system. We would all agree that fairness should be the hallmark of this. We received quite a lot of evidence and disquiet in the sense of how it is calculated. There is the archaicness of the model itself, and perhaps we can come back to that in a minute, but also the content of it and the disregard, shall we say, of assets and things like that. I know that you are going to be doing some work on this, but the committee is curious to know how you are going to approach this, particularly in respect of the calculator.
Baroness Sherlock: You mentioned complexity. I have been in and around social security for a long time. The one thing that Lady Coffey and I would both agree on is that, when it comes to any payments, simplicity and fairness pull in opposite directions. Child benefit is really simple, or at least it used to be. Almost everybody gets the same amount of money for every child. Universal credit is very complicated, but it is fair. These things pull in different directions, and that is absolutely the case with child maintenance.
The CSA had all manner of greater variables. It was much more sensitive to individual circumstances, and we know how it ended up. One of the challenges is trying to plough a line where the system is sensitive enough to be broadly fair in most circumstances. If you have too many moving parts, and any of them can move at any time, the thing simply grinds into the sand.
Having said that, the calculation has not been reviewed since the CMS was set up in 2012, so it is clearly well out of date. We need to make sure that it is both fair and perceived to be fair. The idea was that it was meant to represent an amount of money that was broadly commensurate with what the paying parent would pay on the child if they were still living with them, irrespective of the income or assets of the receiving parent. In other words, you would still have an obligation to your child, and the fact that you have separated, even if your other half is rich, does not mean that you are not still responsible for your child. That was the principle, and it went through the main things that are there.
In the review, we will look at a range of issues that are out there. At the moment, for example, we take account of the paying parent’s income, the number of qualifying children, including any other children they may be responsible for, shared care, how many nights they stay with them, and different aspects. We will look at all of those. We are also open to looking at a range of other things around that, such as how we deal with other forms of unearned income, or how we look at the balance.
We are looking at the amounts. At the moment, you pay a certain amount in bands. Broadly speaking, you pay 12% of your weekly gross income for one child, 16% for two, and 19% for three or more, but there is a minimum threshold that has not moved for a long time, at which you pay only £7 a week. We will look at all of those and, again, try to find ways.
I want to give a health warning that the perfect system is unrunnable, and so what we will be doing is trying to look at all of those. We will consult broadly, because we want it also to be seen to be fair. We will then try to find a way of having an updated version of that. We will also want to look at whether it would be possible to find a way of keeping it up to date, for example, rather than having to do nothing for many years. We will look at that as well.
We have been doing a lot of work on this and trying to gather evidence. We will come to some preliminary views and go out to consultation. Again, any reflections that the committee wants to put into that process will be very gratefully received, because we really are open to looking at how we do that, but just with that caveat about the complexity.
Lord Carter of Coles: Just to be clear for the record, you are committed to reforming it.
Baroness Sherlock: We are committed to reviewing it. If we were to go out to consultation and the entire world said, “Leave it alone”, we would have to think again.
Lord Carter of Coles: In the unlikely event that it does say that.
Baroness Sherlock: We are reviewing it now. We are committed. Later this year, we will go out to consultation on how the calculation might be changed. You will understand that, legally, I can make decisions only in the light of consultation responses when I have taken full account of all of them. If I sound pedantic, that is why.
Lord Carter of Coles: That is a great answer. Just briefly, because I know that we have to move on, do your officials have any sense of the hierarchy of problems in the calculator?
Baroness Sherlock: That is a good question. If MPs write to me, I see the complaints. Certainly, how we treat unearned income is a challenging one, but that is not just about the calculation. It is also about how you go about tracking it down and dealing with it. I do not know if I have a sense of it. I get complaints for all of it.
Chris Smith: I would agree on unearned income. I would also talk about tolerances for changing somebody’s income. The system was based on a time, back in the day, when, generally speaking, people had more stable lives and their income did not change as much, so we have a 25% tolerance for shifting. That is certainly more challenging for people who have more complex employment patterns, where their income goes up and down, and that will also be considered.
Baroness Sherlock: I am sure that you have heard that. The receiving parent will complain that their income has gone up, but we do not change the calculation because it has not gone up by enough, or the paying parent will say that their income has fallen, but it has not fallen by enough. We review the amount once a year and will revisit it only if your income has changed by more than 25%, so we will look at whether that threshold is right as well.
It is a real challenge, because, if you make it too low, you get so many changes that the system just clogs up. To be honest, it also means that the receiving parent has no idea how much money they are going to get week by week, if it is somebody whose income does that. You are trying to find a sweet spot all the time. In the end, it is a zero-sum game. The more the paying parent pays, the more the receiving parent gets.
We wanted to get this bit of the process through first, because that will have different impacts on different people, and the calculation will have different impacts. Our job is to try to look at it in the round while recognising that, every time you push in one direction, it makes some people happy and others unhappy, and the reverse is true. It is one of the most complex things that I have had to do, and I have been in this game a long time.
Lord Carter of Coles: If you do settle for reform, you have the powers because it is in primary legislation. Will you have the powers to reform?
Baroness Sherlock: It depends. Some things can be done with our existing primary powers. Others cannot. For example, if we wanted to move from gross to net income, that would take primary legislation, Duncan, would it not? Some bits we could do with just primary powers, so it depends on where we land up.
The Chair: Should we make it that we do not have to have primary legislation, if we ever want to look at this again?
Baroness Sherlock: Having to go back to primary legislation is quite challenging, because it involves waiting for Bills to come round, as colleagues will know.
Q64 Baroness Coffey: I just want to go on to some supplementary questions that we did not manage to cover. You have 3,500 full-time equivalent staff right now. About £17 million was allocated to help with digitalisation and systems. We are already hearing about efficiencies that you might get. I just wanted to get a sense of whether that will be enough to manage your new caseload. At the moment, I am not clear how many of the nearly half a million arrangements you anticipate will get family-based arrangements, and how many will come on to collect and pay. Is the 3,500 enough?
Baroness Sherlock: I will ask Simon to talk about staffing levels. It is a good question, and one that we are keeping under review. It is absolutely a fair challenge. The department as a whole is looking at trying to find ways of investing in technology, but it is about the timeline. You put the investment in, but when does that come back and how do you manage your staffing going up or down at the right time? Simon, I do not think that that number is quite right. Do you want to talk about what the current figure is?
Simon Hunter: Sorry, what number did you have there for our staffing?
Baroness Coffey: It is 3,500 FTE. Those are ones for Great Britain, which I believe you are responsible for, and the others are in Northern Ireland, who you are not responsible for.
Simon Hunter: We are responsible for the staff in Northern Ireland. They are part of the CMS headcount.
Baroness Coffey: They are, but the Minister is not technically in charge of child maintenance in Northern Ireland.
Simon Hunter: If we are talking about the child maintenance headcount and the staff who work on behalf of the Child Maintenance Service, it is a bigger figure than what you are quoting there.
Baroness Coffey: It is roughly 4,500, but 3,500 for Great Britain.
Simon Hunter: Yes.
Baroness Sherlock: It is reasonable for you to tell Lady Coffey directly whether you think that you are going to have the staff you need to be able to deal with the challenge that is coming down the track at you.
Simon Hunter: Yes, we do. Because of the transformation that has taken place and, to Baroness Coffey’s question before, the way that we train and are able to flex our staff, we absolutely believe that the volume of staff that we have is the right number to be able to deal with it.
Baroness Coffey: As you move away from direct pay to either no involvement with CMS or that, what sort of proportion of the caseload do you anticipate will move to collect and pay?
Duncan Gilchrist: It is about 80%.
Baroness Coffey: So you think that 80% are going to move. That will be way more than doubling the number of cases that you have today, but I appreciate that you may think that some of that is easier to handle.
Duncan Gilchrist: It is worth putting in that the handling of a compliant case on collect and pay, and the handling of a direct pay case, are pretty much similar, so the burden will come from what the delta is as to how many of those are non-compliant. That is a thing that we will need to do planning on.
Baroness Coffey: What you have just said is very important. The next question—
The Chair: I am afraid that I promised to let the Minister go at 10 past.
Baroness Coffey: I was just following up on the supplementary questions.
The Chair: Lord Prentis, was yours a very short question?
Lord Prentis of Leeds: It is a very quick question, and I have been waiting patiently.
The Chair: If you would indulge us, Minister, with a very quick answer, we shall bring it to a close. Thank you.
Q65 Lord Prentis of Leeds: Welcome, Minister. There is something that has bugged me throughout the investigation. We spent a day in the Hastings centre, and that was great. We saw the case studies and the work that goes in. The staff were motivated, and it was a really good day for the people who went there.
You talk about trust, and I talk about perceptions as well. We talked to the users of the service, and it is a completely different picture. It is more frustration than anything. Even where arrangements are running smoothly, which is very important for you, people are still frustrated by the process that they are going through at a time of great stress. How can that be tackled? It is not healthy.
Baroness Sherlock: It is a really great question, and there are different parts to that. In my foreword to the response to the consultation, I said that the CMS is one of those rare public services that nobody really wants to have to use. You never really set out, when you have children, thinking that you are going to end up at the CMS one day. The starting point is that people come to us at a time of very great stress. They do not want to be there. They are often very much at odds with the other party. They may have been forced to go there by the other party, and that comes out in different ways. There are some aspects of that frustration that are external to us in their origins.
For example, if we look at customer satisfaction, you can do instant customer feedback. If somebody does something on the system and you have an interaction, you can see how they felt about it. Often, they will feel really happy about what they have just done. Down the track, even if it has all gone well, if you ask people, they are still not happy with it. I suspect that that is a mixture of, in some cases, unhappiness with something that we have done and, in some cases, unhappiness with the fact that they think they should not be paying what they are paying, or should be getting more, whichever side of the fence you are on. They do not think that they should be in the system at all.
There is some of that that we cannot do anything about. We are spending increasing amounts of time trying to refine our understanding of the way that parents feel about us, to try to work out what things we can do something about and what things we can only try to manage by communications or making the environment better.
In answer to you, I would say that many of the people for whom things go smoothly will never interact. You will never hear from them. The stakeholders will never hear from them. No one hears from them. They go in, the system works and it is fine, but you are right that we want to try to find out how we make things better for everybody who comes through.
It is an iterative process. There is no silver bullet to that, but it is something that the team are very focused on. It is not just to get this right, but to get it right in a way that makes you feel as good as you can, given that life is pretty rubbish at the time when you come to us. There is nothing that we can do to make that better. You want to put things back together. We cannot do that. We just have to not make it worse and try to make it as easy as possible for you to navigate this difficult bit of life. We are very conscious of that, but we are just trying to do the bit that we can, step by step. We hope that, bit by bit, they will come to trust us better and, one day, learn to love us.
The Chair: Thanks very much. I will bring it to a close there. Minister, we are very grateful to you and your officials for spending time with us today and during our inquiry, and providing us with information. Thank you for saying on a number of occasions that the contents of our report, when it is published, are timely and will, we hope, be able to feed into your considerations. I close the meeting and thank you again for your attendance today.
Baroness Sherlock: May I just say thank you, Chair, and thank you to the committee? I want to thank the committee for going to Hastings. I was very impressed that you took the time to go and visit us. I am really grateful that you went, and for the nature and quality of engagement with our team. Thank you again for your interest in this. House of Lords committee reports always add value, and I am really looking forward to reading this one. If there is anything else that you want from us afterwards, please do come back. Thank you very much.
The Chair: Thank you very much