Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Work and Pensions – in the House of Commons at 2:30 pm on 8 October 2007.
James Plaskitt
Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions
2:30,
8 October 2007
Those people will not have to wait until CMEC is in operation because we are already engaged in a programme of improving the CSA's IT system. A number of important releases are out already and the system is operating a lot better, which is why, since the operational improvement programme commenced in April 2006, we are getting child maintenance payments to 63,000 more children, and why we can report that the applications backlog is down by 36 per cent. We are clearing new applications faster, partly because of existing IT improvements.