Children: Maintenance

Tom Brake
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on how many occasions where the Child Support Agency was not able to make deductions directly from non-resident parents' benefit due to technical difficulties in the last three years it was (a) possible and (b) not possible to establish why the technical fault occurred.

Kitty Ussher
The Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission is responsible for the child maintenance system. I have therefore asked the Child Maintenance Commissioner to write to the hon. Member with the information requested.

Letter from Stephen Geraghty:

In reply to your recent Parliamentary Question about the Child Support Agency, the Secretary of State promised a substantive reply from the Child Maintenance Commissioner as the Child Support Agency is now the responsibility of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission.

You asked the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in relation to how many occasions on which the Child Support Agency was not able to make deductions directly from non-resident parents' benefit due to technical difficulties in the last three years it was (a) possible and (b) not possible to establish why the technical fault occurred. [258647]

In child maintenance cases where the non-resident parent is in receipt of state benefit, the Child Support Agency may issue a request to Jobcentre Plus to make a flat rate maintenance deduction from their benefits. This automated request may initially be rejected when the information the Child Support Agency holds differs from that held by Jobcentre Plus; for example, the benefits are now being administered by a different office from where the original request was sent, or the benefits are suspended pending a decision. These reasons are in fact administrative in nature and unfortunately are sometimes perceived to be and explained as technical issues. I understand that such a misunderstanding may have occurred in relation to a constituent's case, for which I apologise.

In such cases, the revised request will often be accepted before affecting maintenance deductions, which are carried out bi-weekly in accordance with benefit payments. Therefore, even if a request to deduct maintenance is initially rejected for an administrative reason, this does not necessarily mean that the maintenance payment was not received by the parent-with-care on time. The Agency does not hold information on the number of rejections which resulted in a deduction being missed or the different reasons why a request may be rejected.0

I hope you find this answer helpful.