A timely hearing
In early March 2025, parliamentarians were considering how to frame the call for evidence about the UK’s child maintenance system.
This hearing is timed at a point of need. Almost one in five children in the UK live in a single-parent family, of whom almost one-half are poor; see report: Living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK: 2022 (PDF, 824kB). In the UK, like many other countries across the Western world, child maintenance is one of the only sources of government support designed specifically for single parent families. In recent years, the government has highlighted the role of child maintenance payments as a means of alleviating child poverty.
However, the current Child Maintenance System (CMS) is broken. Moreover, only a small portion of primary caregivers who are eligible for maintenance payments officially interact with the CMS, raising questions about family financial wellbeing after a shift in family structure.
Evidence given at the House of Lords
Sarah Lambert, Head of Policy and Campaigns at Gingerbread, the national charity working for and with single parent families and the communication partner for the Changing Families, provided public evidence at the House of Lords on the ways the CMS can be reformed to better work for families. She spoke of evidence the Gingerbread collected in collaboration with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, rightly named: #FixTheCMS (PDF, 602kB).
According to this report, 57% of parents with care who have a maintenance arrangement (either private or through the CMS) do not receive regular payments. And parents interacting with the CMS report a range of difficulties including:
- Long delays when contacting the service by phone
- Confusing or unclear communication
- Negative experiences for survivors of domestic abuse
- Weak or inconsistent enforcement of payments
When issues like these persist, children’s financial wellbeing is threatened, and there is a strong connection between issues and child poverty.
Recommendations
In addition to highlighting the problems with CMS, Sarah also highlighted some key recommendations, including:
- Assigning named caseworkers for consistency and accountability
- Improving digital communication tools and platforms
- Strengthening enforcement measures to ensure payments are made
- Providing better staff training, particularly around supporting victim-survivors of domestic abuse
