[holding answer 21 March 2007]: The administration of the Child Support Agency is a matter for the Chief Executive. He will write to the hon. Member with the information requested.
Letter from Stephen Geraghty, dated 16 April 2007:
In reply to your recent Parliamentary Questions about the Child Support Agency, the Secretary of State promised a substantive reply from the Chief Executive.
You asked the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what progress has been made in meeting the targets for the Child Support Agency set out in the Child Support Agency Business Plan 2006-07; which targets he expects will be (a) met and (b) not met; and if he will make a statement.
The Child Support Agency has six targets set by the Secretary of State for 2006-07, which were published in the Agency’s Business Plan, a copy of which is available in the House of Commons Library, or on the internet via the following link: www.csa.gov.uk/pdf/english/reports/plan0607.pdf.
The Agency’s current performance against these targets is published every three months in tables 2.1, 3, 7.2, 8.1,12, and 17 of the Child Support Agency Quarterly Summary Statistics.
Latest performance to December 2006 is currently available on the Internet via the following link: www.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd1/child_support/csa_quarterly_dec06.asp and a hard copy is in the House of Commons Library.
The final assessment of how the Agency has performed against these targets, including achievements from January to March, will be published in the March 2007 Child Support Agency Quarterly Summary Statistics.
I hope you find this answer helpful.
[holding answer 23 February 2007]: The administration of the Child Support Agency is a matter for the Chief Executive. He will write to the hon. Member with the information requested.
Letter from Stephen Geraghty, dated 3 April 2007:
In reply to your recent Parliamentary Question about the Child Support Agency, the Secretary of State promised a substantive reply from the Chief Executive.
You asked the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many (a) old scheme and (b) new scheme Child Support Agency cases were cleared in each month of the last two years for which figures are available.
The information requested is presented in the attached table.
The clearance process includes all work undertaken on applications for child maintenance until one of the following conditions is met: a parent with care has been identified as claiming Good Cause or is subject to a Reduced Benefit Decision; the application is identified as being a change of circumstances on an existing case; the application has been closed; or for old scheme cases a maintenance assessment has been carried out and for new scheme cases, a payment arrangement between the parent with care and the non-resident parent is in place.
The Agency holds only a negligible number of completely unprocessed applications. The amount of work required to achieve clearance, and the length of time involved, varies considerably depending on, amongst other things, the circumstances of the parents and how readily they cooperate with the Agency. The work undertaken by the Agency’s New Client Teams extends far beyond simply clearing new applications through the computer system. A significant proportion of the work undertaken by the Agency’s New Client Teams consists of setting up the first maintenance payments to the parent with care, and retaining responsibility for this growing caseload until the first fully compliant, on time payment is made by the non-resident parent.
In addition, under the Operational Improvement Plan, the Agency is committed to reducing the number of uncleared applications. The number of uncleared applications fell by 13 per cent. in the 12 months prior to December 2006, as the Agency made progress in clearing significant numbers of older, more complex cases. These cased often require a great deal more work than other applications and this is reflected in the increasing average age of cleared cases.
For future reference, information on the number of new scheme clearances is publicly available in the Child Support Agency Quarterly Summary of Statistics (QSS), a copy of which is available in the House of Commons Library, or on the internet via the following link: http//www.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd1/child_support/csa_quarterly_dec06.asp.
I hope you find this answer helpful.
Month ending New scheme Old scheme Total 2005 January 20,400 4,500 24,900 February 22,600 4,400 27,100 March 26,800 4,000 30,800 April 25,100 4,200 29,300 May 27,400 6,500 33,800 June 26,100 6,200 32,200 July 26,500 5,200 31,800 August 25,500 4,000 29,500 September 24,500 4,700 29,100 October 25,200 5,600 30,900 November 32,800 3,800 36,600 December 27,100 3,000 30,100 2006 January 28,800 3,100 31,900 February 29,900 3,400 33,300 March 34,000 3,600 37,600 April 29,200 2,700 31,900 May 26,500 2,200 28,800 June 28,700 2,300 31,000 July 30,700 2,400 33,100 August 26,400 2,400 28,800 September 25,800 3,600 29,400 October 29,000 4,100 33,100 November 23,700 1,900 25,600 December 19,900 1,300 21,200 Notes to table: 1. Numbers are rounded to the nearest hundred. 2. The increase in the number of old scheme clearances in September and October 2006 was as a result of work being carried out to clear a number of cases that had previously not been on the system. 3. The definition of a clearance is not the same on the old and new schemes. A clearance on the old scheme occurs when an assessment has been carried out, a case is closed, the parent with care (PWC) is identified as claiming Good Cause or the PWC is subject to a Reduced Benefit Decision. For a new scheme case to be cleared it must also have a maintenance collection schedule set up following a calculation.
The administration of the Child Support Agency is a matter for the Chief Executive. He will write to my hon. Friend with the information requested.
Letter from Stephen Geraghty, dated 16 April 2007:
In reply to your recent Parliamentary Question about the Child Support Agency, the Secretary of State promised a substantive reply from the Chief Executive.
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, on what date he expects all old cases of the Child Support Agency to have been brought under the new system; and if he will make a statement. [124684]
The problems encountered by the Agency following the launch of the Reforms in 2003 are well documented and were widely publicised at the time. As a result of these problems the decision to bulk migrate and convert the caseload was deferred, although from the launch of the Reforms in March 2003 new rules applications to child support have continued to trigger the reactive migration of old rules cases from CSCS and following migration relevant cases have been reactively converted from old to new rules.
The child maintenance White Paper “A new system of child maintenance” sets out radical and far-reaching proposals for the wholesale reform of the child maintenance system. Box 3.1 on page 54, details the expected timetable for transition to the new system.
I hope you find this response helpful.