Policy background
- All parents have a legal responsibility to support their children financially until they are 16 years old and, in some circumstances, until they are 20. This can be through voluntary arrangements between separated parents, arrangements made by way of a court order, or by way of child maintenance calculated and enforced under the statutory child maintenance scheme run by DWP (or by the Department for Communities in Northern Ireland) and administered by the CMS (or the Child Maintenance Service in Northern Ireland).
- The statutory child maintenance scheme was introduced by the Child Support Act 1991 (the 1991 Act) and has been in operation since 1993. The current scheme was introduced in December 2012 and all applications since November 2013 have been calculated under the "2012 rules". (The two previous schemes, the "1993 rules" and the "2003 rules" are now closed.) Under the statutory scheme, the CMS is responsible for calculating child maintenance payments and, in some cases, collecting and enforcing them. A PWC cannot enforce child maintenance payments calculated by the CMS. Child maintenance legislation provides a comprehensive set of powers and obligations.
- The CMS manages cases through one of two service types: direct pay and collect and pay. In direct pay cases, the CMS calculates how much maintenance should be paid, issues a payment schedule, and the NRP pays the maintenance to the PWC. For collect and pay, CMS calculates how much maintenance should be paid, collects the money from the NRP and pays it to the PWC.
- There are collection charges set out in regulations for the use of the collect and pay service: 20% on top of the liability for the NRP, and 4% of the maintenance received for the PWC.
- Under previous legislation, the Secretary of State had the power to collect maintenance payments (under the collect and pay service) only where:
- the NRP agrees to the arrangements, or
- the CMS is satisfied that without the arrangements child support maintenance is unlikely to be paid in accordance with the calculation.
- Therefore, under previous legislation, direct pay was the default option, unless the NRP agreed to collect and pay, or was deemed ‘unlikely to pay’ by demonstrating an unwillingness to pay their liability.
- This power has been introduced to further strengthen the existing support for domestic abuse victims. The Act creates an additional power to collect maintenance payments. This allows the Secretary of State (or the DfC in Northern Ireland) to place a child maintenance case onto the collect and pay service when the Secretary of State or DfC is satisfied that there is evidence of behaviour of a parent that amounts to domestic abuse as set out in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 (or the Domestic Abuse and Civil Proceedings Act (Northern Ireland) 2021 in Northern Ireland), against the other parent or children in their household, and that it is appropriate to make the arrangements. The evidence requirements will be set out in secondary legislation.
