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Children: Maintenance

Department for Work and Pensions written question – answered at on 9 September 2024.

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Photo of Julia Buckley Julia Buckley Labour, Shrewsbury

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the total value of child maintenance arrears was on 30 August 2024.

Photo of Andrew Western Andrew Western The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions

The Department publishes quarterly statistics for the Child Maintenance Service and the latest statistics are available up to March 2024. The next release covering the statistics to June 2024 is scheduled for Tuesday 24th September 2024 at 09:30am.

The total value of child maintenance that has not been paid and now needs to be collected through ‘Collect and Pay’ at the end of March 2024 was £634.9 million, as shown in Table 6 of the National tables.

The following information is a summary from the latest publication for data up to March 2024.

  • In the 12 months up to March 2024 the child maintenance service arranged £1.4 billion child maintenance, an increase from £1.2 billion during the previous 12 months.
  • 61% of all CMS arrangements use Direct Pay, with 37% using Collect and Pay and just over one billion pounds was arranged through the Direct Pay service in the last 12 months (we do not measure the compliance of Paying Parents on the Direct Pay service).
  • Since March 2023, the percentage of parents paying something towards their maintenance through collect & pay has increased from 65% to 69%.
  • In the period April 2023 to March 2024 £316.8 million was arranged through the Collect & Pay service:

o £224.9 million was paid o £91.9 million was unpaid

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  • (Citation: HC Deb, 9 September 2024, cW)

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