Written evidence submitted by the Work and Pensions Committee [CMS0124]

Summary note: Child Maintenance Service private briefing

The Work and Pensions Committee held a private briefing with Officials from the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) on 15 June 2026. The witnesses opened the session with a presentation on the CMS; and afterwards, Members asked questions including on safeguarding, the CMS calculation, enforcement and complaint handling.

The session was held in private to encourage an open dialogue. The Committee has produced the following summary note which sets out the key points discussed during the session.

Summary note

Presentation

CMS officials described how child poverty was particularly prevalent amongst families with separated parents. The service therefore focused on helping more families to establish arrangements, CMS explained that since 2023 the proportion of separated families with an arrangement has grown demonstrating that more families are receiving the support and stability that an effective child maintenance arrangement can provide.

CMS Officials explained that parents often involve CMS where a private arrangement is unsuitable or not possible, often due to a breakdown in relations and an inability or desire to communicate with one another.  Therefore, as a last resort CMS are engaged and this is where discontent can arise. Officials recognised that the CMS suffers from reputational damage, some views are based on direct experiences while others continue to be influenced by historic experiences of the former Child Support Agency (CSA). Officials recognised that some customers have not received the level of service CMS aim to provide and will continue to learn from feedback and continue improving the experience they deliver.

Officials presented a slide showing performance metrics demonstrating service improvement and a long-term trend in the number of parents using the CMS increasing and in improved compliance which is the highest level recorded to date. The Government had heavily invested in the service to make it work better for parents; and it did this by taking a sustained operational focus to its work and by committing to continuous improvement.  

The Officials said the CMS received relatively few complaints. Many parents used the service successfully and did not contact the CMS for reasons beyond organising an arrangement. Many said they valued the guidance they received and found communications from the CMS clear. 

The CMS used an ‘omnichannel’ customer service approach, which included a telephony channel, webchat, online and ‘customer connect’, to improve accessibility. The CMS recognised that the way people used the service had changed. For example, more parents were now using the digital service, and it was perceived to be the quickest and simplest way to engage. Crucially however, the service was not digital only. Officials envisioned that as more parents chose to use the digital and online service, this could free up capacity for caseworkers to focus on complex cases more. Officials said that online products had evolved with users in mind.  

Officials presented a slide to the Committee that set out several digital interfaces, which included the online calculator, the ‘Get help arranging child maintenance’ page, and an online account. They said that ‘customer connect’—a secure online communication channel between parents and caseworkers—would be expanded throughout 2026. 

To improve the service, the CMS provided enhanced training to caseworkers, enhanced listening checks, and used these and other mechanisms to create a feedback loop to identify issues, and to feed learning back into the service through targeted improvements.  

The CMS recognised that customers said enforcement was sometimes too slow. Therefore, it was reviewing its operational model to understand how to improve enforcement and was undertaking work so the CMS could identify non-compliance earlier and help prevent arrears from accruing.  

Questions and discussion

Reforming the system

Officials said they had the firm expectation that the Government was on track to introduce legislation to remove the Direct Pay service and changes to the fee structure as soon as Parliamentary time was available. They also expected that changes to the income tolerance threshold, from 25% to 15%, would be made as soon as possible. 

A Member asked if the Officials were of the mind that the CMS should be radically reformed. An Official said the change the Government was making to the CMS—to abolish Direct Pay—was a radical reform. The CMS had been criticised for the operation of Direct Pay for a long time, and its removal was expected to make the service more reliable; that it would reduce non-compliance; and it would make the service safer for survivors of abuse. 

Beyond the move to the single tier system, the CMS was amending fee structures and making other changes, for example, by improving support for parents who may wish to use a Family Based Arrangement. The CMS was trying to find ways to take some of the heat out of parental relationships. This included impressing on parents that conflict was bad for children. 

An Official said that if the Government undertook a fundamental review of the CMS, to rebuild it from the bottom-up, they expected it would lead to the creation of a fairly similar service. Around the world, countries tended to use either a courts-based system, or an administrative-based system—as the UK had. The general drift had been from the former to the latter.  

Calculation formula review

Members asked questions relating to the child maintenance calculation formula, and why, in particular, it did not include both parents’ income. An official described how the DWP had undertaken an extensive review of the calculation, which included surveys, roundtables, evidence reviews and original research. 

The Government had taken the view that it would not include income from both parents into the formula. This was because the impact of doing so would increase complexity and administrative burden on the CMS, as the service would need to be responsive to both parents’ income changes. The Official said this option would not be permanently off the table. For example, perhaps it would be possible in the future, if aspects of the service could be automated. The system did not yet have the sensitivity to enable such a change, however. 

A Member said that interacting with the CMS, and the calculation formula, could create tensions across wider, blended families. For example, unaffordable child maintenance payments could lead to a paying parent being unable to adequately support other children, not involved in that maintenance arrangement.

An Official said they recognised this dynamic, the impact it could have on children in separate family units, and that it could increase poverty amongst these families. Overall, however, they saw that the current approach resulted in a larger net increase in child poverty reduction. An Official said the CMS was among the most effective service of its kind amongst OECD countries, with regards to lifting children out of poverty (due to its disregard of CM payments when calculating benefit payments).  

Domestic abuse and safeguarding

A Member asked about the CMS’s Specialist Casework Team. An official described how the Team was introduced after Dr Samantha Callan’s review into the CMS. When a call handler or caseworker identified that a person was at risk of abuse, or experiencing abuse—either through self-disclosure, inquiry, or picking up on indicators—they would be able to refer the individual to the team. Caseworkers in the team manage cases to the same legislation but could apply specialist case handling, which meant the individual would not need to tell their story repeatedly.

The Official emphasised that all CMS caseworkers had domestic abuse related training. The service recognised that caseworkers needed to be properly equipped and it therefore did a significant amount of call evaluation, quality assurance and coaching internally. This included training to support caseworkers to pick up on indicators that a person was being coercively controlled. 

An Official said the CMS was in the process of appointing a Safeguarding Lead to have oversight of safeguarding in the service. The CMS would monitor the effectiveness of the Specialist Casework Team by working with external partners. 

Non-compliance

A Member asked a question about the CMS’s definition of non-compliance. An Official said the CMS expects parents to pay 100% of their payments on time. The Official also explained that published compliance measures are reported separately and are designed to recognise that, as a result of how payment scheduling works in practice, some instances of technical non-compliance can arise even when someone has paid everything they have been asked to pay.

Complaints

A Member asked what the CMS’s assessment was of PHSO figures, which showed that it had received an increase in the number of complaints it received relating to the CMS.

The Official said the number of complaints the CMS received directly was relatively low. They suggested that a higher number of complaints could suggest that people were continuing to pursue an outcome that they did not like, but was not incorrect.

The Official said that the CMS recognised that it did not always get things right, and that the number of complaints it received, that were upheld or partially upheld, was much higher than they would like.

October 2026