Children: Maintenance

Department for Work and Pensions written question – answered at on 15 May 2018.

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Photo of Antoinette Sandbach Antoinette Sandbach Conservative, Eddisbury

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many parents have been prosecuted for failing to report increases in their income to the Child Maintenance Service or Child Support Agency in each of the last three years.

Photo of Kit Malthouse Kit Malthouse The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions

There have been no prosecutions undertaken in the last three years due solely to parents failing to report “increases in their income”. Prosecutions would be undertaken by CMG for under-declaration of income under the Fraud Act or 14(A)2 of the Child Support Act. These prosecutions focus on wilful non-disclosure of income streams and rarely relate to a single failure to disclose in-year increases.

We will have prosecuted people with an element of non-disclosures (of increases to income) but these non-disclosures will only represent a small part of the overall prosecution on each case. Therefore we cannot separate increases to income as a single prosecution type.

We complete Annual reviews using HMRC data and where we identify backdated increases to income, we will reassess the historical assessment and raise any arrears, taking steps to collect. If the paying parent then fails to pay these arrears we can register the liability in court and take enforcement action to secure the debt, including – in some cases – enforcement including imprisonment. These actions however, relate to the debt (and failure to pay), and not the “increase in income”.

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