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The Performance of the Child Support Agency
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Archive - June 2004 Submission to the Work and Pensions Select Committee from One Parent Families.
The full submission can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.
Summary
1. Problems in getting child maintenance remain a major concern of lone parents, who lack confidence in the Child Support Agency (CSA) as an effective organisation to help them access the money they need to support their children.
2. One Parent Families backed the radically reformed child support system when it went through Parliament in 2000. However, we made it clear that "the package must ensure that any reductions in child maintenance are balanced by an absolute commitment from the outset to improve collection and enforcement and achieve a marked improvement in compliance levels."
3. That has yet to happen. IT and telephony problems have dogged the much-needed reforms, leading to substantial delays in implementation. Fewer cases under the new system have been processed than forecast, and compliance levels have not met expectations. Meanwhile, compliance levels for nearly a million parents with care on the existing system remain highly unsatisfactory. Only 54 per cent of cases collected by the CSA are fully compliant, and in a quarter of cases no maintenance is collected at all.
4. The CSA has extensive powers to ensure compliance and enforce payment of child maintenance, which were extended as a result of the 2000 child support legislation. The problem appears to be that, so far at least, it has failed to make collection (both of current maintenance and arrears) and enforcement a key goal of the business. The Agency itself has identified that there is £783 million outstanding in child maintenance owed to parents with care, which it judges is recoverable. Yet despite plans to develop a debt reduction target for 2004-05, the Agency has started the current year without one.
5. Self-employed cases represent a small proportion of the CSA case load. But they present intractable problems in terms of non-resident parents seeking to conceal their true income to avoid paying child maintenance. One Parent Families believes more needs by the Inland Revenue and the Child Support Agency working together to bear down on this group, and outlines a number of possible options.
6. The child support reform package struck a balance: lower payments for most absent parents on the one hand, but higher levels of compliance -- brought about by a substantial transfer of staff time from calculating maintenance to pursuing payment. Whilst the CSA can, at this stage, blame IT problems for a failure to achieve expected compliance levels during the first year of the new scheme, a new cloud has appeared on the horizon. In the next two years, the Agency is expected to reduce its staff headcount by 2, 600. The danger is that, the gradual 'freeing up' of CSA staff time as a result of the new simpler system will not lead to a concerted and energetic focus on ensuring maintenance is paid and debts recovered, but rather to staff cuts. We would regard it as a serious breach of faith on the part of the Government, if this were to happen.
7. One Parent Families views an effective child support scheme as a vital element in the Government's strategy to eliminate child poverty by 2020, and to achieve its target of 70 per cent lone parent employment by 2010. The DWP's Public Service Agreement target, to increase to 60 per cent the proportion of parents with care on Income Support and income-based Jobseeker's Allowance who receive child maintenance for their children, will only be met if the CSA has the resources and determination to make compliance, arrears collection and enforcement a central priority.
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