Oral evidence: Child Maintenance Service, HC 74

Oral evidence, 28 October 2026.

Witness

Paula Sussex CBE, Public Service Ombudsman.

Chair

A very warm welcome to the third of our three sessions and the final session for the Child Maintenance Service inquiry. We are delighted to welcome Paula Sussex, who is the Public Service Ombudsman. I want to reflect on the complaints that you deal with in relation to the Child Maintenance Service and try to understand the patterns that you have observed and why they seem to differ in volume, in particular, from what the DWP is experiencing and reporting.

Paula Sussex

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Committee. It is perhaps helpful to say at the start that the ombudsman comes right at the end of the process. By definition, a parent who is complaining will have been through two stages of the complaint process and the good work that our colleagues at ICE do before they come to us. None the less, as you say, Chair, it is remarkable that, although we observe that DWP says that CMS complaints have declined, ours have doubled over four years. I am afraid I have no firm evidence as to what might be driving that, but we think that there is some element of complaints not being handled effectively, by definition, and there is that compound of, if you have been through two stages and you then go to ICE—the independent complaint examiner—if you are still not satisfied, you then come to us. However, I should set this in the context that we are doing some wider research on the general increase in complaints across all public services. We are seeing something like a 20% to 25% increase in complaints coming to us. Our analysis is starting to show that there is generally—if I can describe it as this—greater persistence and greater distress, which is causing complainants to persist for longer. The third possible reason—which is, of course, another global reason—is the pressure of the cost of living on a lot of parents and families.

Chair

Would you say that the Child Maintenance Service is one of the services that you have the most complaints about?

Paula Sussex

No. As I am sure the Committee knows, we have a health and a government jurisdiction. Health is 80% of our work and government is only 20%. In terms of the government work, last year we received only 500 complaints, and that will be against a considerably larger number for the whole of our government work. However, CMS is about one third of the complaints that we receive about all DWP services.

Chair

That is very interesting.

Mr Peter Bedford

On those statistics, what themes are coming out in the complaints regarding the CMS?

Paula Sussex

We have recently written to the Department about a systemic investigation that I will come to in a minute. By way of making some overarching comments, as the Committee will know very well, CMS manages an unenviable combination of high-volume and highly complex processes, so it is fair to say that it is doing some very good work in the simple cases. On the themes that we see, I would say that there are a raft of issues about better customer service. Something that we observe in other areas of DWP is a process that is designed and run around the customer rather than the policy or the regulations and, at the root of it, standing in your customer’s shoes. That is difficult to do if you are operating something that is—as I know from my own operational experience as an accounting officer. None the less, when you know that your customer base is having an extraordinarily tough time—they are not in the best state—you have to be really rigorous about how you communicate with your customers, how you keep them up to speed and how they are understanding the rules and regulations.

Mr Peter Bedford

Building on what you just said about the customer experience, why do you think there has been a fall in the number of complaints directly to the Department but there has been a significant rise in what you have received? I would surmise that that could be because there is a lack of confidence in the process in the Department to handle those complaints effectively. What is your view?

Paula Sussex

I will, of course, encourage you to ask the Department why the Department’s complaints are falling. I cannot speculate on its behalf, but we—I will turn to this at some point in this hearing—believe that there is work to be done on the Department’s complaint handling, so how it actually manages and resolves its complaints. As for the disparity between us, I should also say that ICE is showing an increase. We and ICE show a broadly increasing trend, whereas CMS is showing a decreasing trend. That is not what we see across our health and government jurisdiction. Generally, when I am out with a mental health and community trust, as I was yesterday, those, too, are seeing a 20% to 30% increase in complaints. I would therefore speculate that there is something about the ease with which customers can complain.

Mr Peter Bedford

What impact would removing the MP filter have in cases involving the CMS?

Paula Sussex

Generally, as the Committee knows, we are supportive of the MP filter being removed in our government jurisdiction, although we always welcome the opportunity for complainants to work with their MPs. In this particular service, we see a higher number of complaints that have an MP actively engaged and involved, which we welcome. I am sure that my team sitting behind me also work quite closely with caseworkers from a number of your constituencies, as we work together. In this particular service, that might not have a huge impact but generally we would welcome it.

Mr Peter Bedford

Finally, I think you mentioned that a third of your caseload is from the CMS—or a third of the 20% that you deal with.

Paula Sussex

A third of the DWP of the 20%—and DWP is about probably 20% of government complaints.

Mr Peter Bedford

You obviously see a lot of different organisations. Which of those could the CMS learn from for their own processes?

Paula Sussex

First, although the CMS and the Department have not brought this to us, we have identified in our caseworker-to-caseworker interactions that the service modernisation programme—I am sure the Committee is aware of what it intends to cover; I think it is a multi-year programme. Having got an outline of that—again, if I go back through my own operational experience—if the Department executes on that well, if it is a funded programme and if it executes to the outcomes that we have been indicated that it will achieve, it will be in a better place. On learning from other organisations, we see some organisations that manage communications of complex financial affairs—and these are complex. Lives are complex. Regulations are complex, sometimes unnecessarily so. We see other organisations that can handle communicating that complexity better. We certainly point to HMRC and student loans, which, I should confess, I ran for some years, manages to reflect the situation—not flawlessly but they will give a repaying individual a better breakdown of where they are in their process and their account.

Patrick Hurley

Still on complexity, you said in your evidence that the CMS performs less effectively perhaps than other organisations or than it could in complex cases. Do you think it is inherent in the work of CMS that sometimes there are just issues relating to families that cause that complexity, or is this perhaps an issue around competence or a training need for DWP?

Paula Sussex

First, I think we said in the evidence that we have identified that simple cases are dealt with better than complex cases—so perhaps more in the absolute. Again, if you go back to the perfect storm of there being a high volume—I think CMS has about 800,000, I am going to say, customers, over presumably an 18 or 19-year time period, and highly complex rules and regs that change. That is a very difficult state of affairs. Where other organisations have taken different operational decisions—for example, having a specialist or complex caseworking team—that sometimes works. We see that in HMCTS probate. However, the key thing is how you communicate with the customer as you are going through a complex set of circumstances. To turn to, I suppose, how it feels, we the ombudsman work from the complainants’ evidence in the first instance, so we are in the privileged position of standing initially in their shoes. We hold neither for the complainant nor the organisation, as you know, because we are impartial. A very typical expression of sometimes how it feels is confusing, protracted and without support, and that is particularly so in the complex cases.

Patrick Hurley

Do you think that would be addressed by bringing in a complex case unit?

Paula Sussex

It could be. On operational flow and backlog, there are arguments for and against that, and I am sure that the CMS team has looked at it. I would probably go more to the service modernisation programme. We would very much welcome stronger engagement to understand that—that reading between the lines and getting that in are the sorts of things that we have identified would help in our cases.

John Milne

Good morning. I want to talk about how the CMS communicates with parents, and that is done in two ways. One is about basic admin. Do they answer the phone? Do they reply to an email? And deeper than that basic admin level, are their communications, letters and so on comprehensible? Do they get the information across?

Paula Sussex

I will go to the second part first if I may. Again, we find with DWP in different areas, in pensions as well—this is well on the public record—that if you look hard at the DWP service charter, you will sometimes look at the communications and say, “This isn’t measuring up well,” in terms of how clear it is, but also checking on how well it is understood. I took the opportunity to look at DWP’s 2025-26 customer experience survey, and you can probably see that echoed in the feedback on that. We sometimes find that the communications are too boilerplate, too macro. There need to be regular updates to the customer: “What is happening with my case? Why?” And to give it a very grand word, there needs to be procedural justice: “Why have you made this calculation this way? What caused you to do this?” There is certainly work to be done there. Again, if I go back to the programme, DWP reflects on that and says that it will get better at that. On the first part—on keeping customers up to date and up to speed—we are also not blameless in that respect, and we are working hard on it. None of us do this well enough. We and the DWP are creating an online account, which helps a bit because you have a dedicated space where you will get more of an update of how your case is progressing and why. There is certainly more work to be done there. One thing that we have picked up anecdotally is that some of the communications assume that a paying parent intends to be delinquent from the off and that they are sometimes rather harsh from the start—they assume. Whereas, and I am sure the Department knows this, many paying parents actually want to be doing the right thing by their children.

John Milne

Yes, I have heard exactly that from some of the cases in my constituency. I am sure everyone else has, too. You have done a lot of work on the WASPI issue, which was very much about a failure to communicate. Are there any lessons to be applied from that?

Paula Sussex

Yes—I would probably go back to standing in the shoes of your customer. How could this individual receive this communication? Is it coming through the right channel at the right time? Is it being delivered empathetically? I note that they are investing in trauma-informed services, so will they be able to receive it? How do we know they have received it? What can we expect? What is a reasonable expectation of that communication? This is about the very definition. We are talking about a receiver of communication, a customer who is at a heightened state—they are not at their best—so the effort to communicate really well and check that it has been understood needs to be more than your average day-to-day communication.

John Milne

You previously told us about a case where a parent was sent a letter threatening legal action, but it was based on incorrect information. What checks and balances can be put into the system so that it does not leap to a draconian or tough demand?

Paula Sussex

Realistically, on that volume of service and complexity, the IT was inevitably not designed for the complexity that I suspect successive years of policy regs have put in. Sometimes that is unavoidable. The important thing is that all organisations respond quickly with an apology and what they will do to fix it. Yes, you can put in various checks and balances, but we accept, of course, that mistakes will be made. It is about how you respond, show contrition—I may come later to the complaints handling—and consider the impact on the customer, not what went wrong in the process. Where you can redress, can you redress? What was the impact of this? We do not see enough focus on the complainants in the complaint process.

John Milne

I have a constituent who went through a two-year process with a mandatory review of his case. He was not told at the start that the tribunal had no power to change the way the calculation was done, so it was two years for absolutely nothing. It is bad enough that the system is like that, but not being told in the first place is even worse.

Paula Sussex

Yes.

Damien Egan

I will ask a bit more about the service modernisation programme, because there have been criticism and comments about its limited functionality and issues about uploading documents. That is the feedback I have had from constituents who have come to my surgeries feeling very distressed about it. How is the service modernisation programme progressing? How confident are you that we can get to a service that truly matches the expectations that people have? More critically, what do you need to get there?

Paula Sussex

If I can go to that last question first, we would welcome the Committee’s support in encouraging CMS. It is not that it has said no, it is not going to share the service modernisation programme, but we would find it helpful if we could get closer to the programme and its aims to follow through on its delivery. We have heard anecdotally that the portal is not working perfectly, which I think is what you are referring to. That is not infrequently the case. This is government IT. It is not going to be flawless, as I am sure the Committee has heard before. We would happily come back or submit something to the Committee once we have a better understanding of “What is the programme? What is the process? How can you keep us up to speed with how it is going and how it is addressing things?” The Committee will be aware that we are working much more closely with the pension side of the Department on the action plan. I am not suggesting, nor do we have the resource, that we work as closely with the Department as we are on the action plan, but I think there could be something in between so we can see what it is trying to do. That will help to give an assessment of individual redress and also of how we can support the Committee for you to oversee the success of the Department’s service. This is particularly key if the move to collect and pay kicks in at some point, because that will be a major programme for the Department, a major disruption.

Chair

Thank you. That is very useful.

Steve Darling

Thank you for coming and giving evidence. I see from your previous employment that you have been a merchant for change and transformation, and a big part of taking people on the journey is trust and ensuring that they continue to trust in the system. How do you see your role of ensuring that there is greater development of trust? Are you able to pull from stuff in your previous life or, equally, can you look at how other large organisations have developed trust with users?

Paula Sussex

That is an enormously good question and one that exercises me considerably. The backdrop to this societally—as I am sure you and the Committee are very well aware—is that trust in Government and national public services has decreased worryingly over the last few years. In fact, we surveyed this in August. We have not yet published the analysis, but 51% said that, over recent years, their trust in national Government services had declined. That is a fairly serious backdrop to be operating in. We see no evidence that endemically customers do not trust CMS. They do not trust it for its competence when things are going wrong and things aren’t being explained. They then lose confidence and, therefore, you can say they lose trust. None the less, closer engagement—it would be interesting to hear from the Department how it does this—with its users in the way that it is working to modernise the service is the first thing that I would do in terms of building more trust in the overall organisation.

Chair

We have come to the end of our formal questions, but would you like to add to the evidence that you provided to the Committee specifically on the CMS? We were very concerned about the level of complaints, particularly given, as you rightly said, that this follows on from ICE involvement. The National Audit Office was similarly very scathing about this. As you rightly said, this is a very emotional time for families, and I really do reflect on what you say about treating people as you are,and living in their shoes. All too often, that does not happen, and all of us need to do that as public servants—I am sure we all do with our constituents. Is there anything specifically that you would like to add to the recommendations that you have made about complaints or whatever?

Paula Sussex

Building on the point that there is a considerable increase in complaints, we cannot see a key driver, but we see a lot of people coming to us in heightened distress, challenging situations, and so on. We have opened a systemic investigation, which is about the collection of arrears, but it is not a dominant theme. The key thing that I have not really shared with the Committee probably lies in complaints handling. They have a two-stage process, which is not uncommon, but it only works well if the first stage is about review and exchange—an informal but productive and effective stage. If that is not the case—we have seen evidence that the word “dissatisfaction” is used, which I am sure some of your constituents think means a complaint has been registered and then it hasn’t and you bounce around the system. We think it is about really leaning into that complaints process and working on and investing in it to resolve complaints. We know that caseworkers will say, “We don’t get consistent communication or timelines from the complaints function”. I am sorry that we do not have a clear answer of what is driving that increase, except to say that we should have a look at the complaints function and how they are handling it. That is the only thing that I can logically point to.

John Milne

There are problems with all Departments, and DWP in general. But anecdotally, I think most MPs would agree that we get more issues with this Department than any other. Whether that is a fair representation or not, it involves some of the most distressing cases. They are particularly distressing because in many cases it can result in a parent being separated from a child for a very long time while some appalling bureaucratic process is going on. A year separated from a child is an infinity. It is so damaging. That time cannot be made up. We did feel last time we met the CMS that it did not fully appreciate the scale of the challenge. Do you think that the CMS does? It needs to up its game because the human consequences are particularly egregious.

Paula Sussex

It is difficult. With this particular part of DWP, we work at the operational level, and it is always important to say that there are a lot of great frontline workers working hard in both our jurisdictions. In this area, we do not engage with any senior levels, so it is difficult for me to say whether institutionally it grasps this and is putting the resource into it. I would go back to what I said about focusing on the life of your complainant. I was told anecdotally—not by somebody from the Department—that about 15 years ago when the IT was being designed, they thought that the maximum number of change of circumstances that anybody would have would be four. That is probably not borne out in practice. If systems and regulation are designed around a set of lives that don’t exist, it makes it extremely hard. The only thing that we have seen happening in our health jurisdiction, where your IT or the regulations mean that the situation is very complex and you cannot really speed it up, is the concept of “waiting well”—in health, they have backlogs in ADHD assessments. Waiting well is about ensure that they have a way of making contact with parents or patients and helping them cope as they go through, and possibly through some of their trauma-informed work. Some of this cannot be avoided, but you can certainly make it a better experience in the year that you mentioned, which is very painful, probably for both parents.

Chair

On complaints handling, would you be able to give relative weighting to what you are saying about the administrative issues, consistency and record keeping compared with what you are saying about the cultural issues within the service?

Paula Sussex

That is tricky, but I would probably lean towards the complaints handling. I would make the offer to CMS to put—we have been running some training across DWP, but perhaps CMS may find it helpful to lean in more to the work that is being done on the complaints handling function.

Chair

In relation to earlier questions on safeguarding across the service, we were very surprised to hear that it was not automatically flagged when there might be issues around domestic abuse, which certainly has come up in our roundtables with parents. Is that something that you highlight with complaints that have been brought to you?

Paula Sussex

We have not seen that specifically as a clear theme. However, if you and the Committee have seen that, it is probably consistent with the way in which they risk-assess their cases and, as cases come through, it is important to be able to identify where there are compounded complexities. If a case is not removed from what is sometimes referred to as—inappropriately in this circumstance—the “happy path” of straightforward processing, those complexities can be overlooked. We can certainly see elements of that here. Accordingly, if cases are not being assessed for risks of harm or other safeguarding concerns, we would recommend that the CMS addresses that. However, I do not know whether that is the case or not.

Chair

We have concluded our questions for today. Paula, thank you so much for joining us; We are very grateful.

Paula Sussex

Thank you. Examination of witnesses

Witnesses

Baroness Sherlock OBE, Simon Hunter, Duncan Gilchrist and Lucy Appleton.

Chair

Welcome to the second panel of this third and final evidence session on the Child Maintenance Service. It is a pleasure to be joined by the DWP Minister, Maeve Sherlock. Baroness Sherlock, thank you very much for joining us. You have brought your team as well: Simon Hunter, director of the CMS; Duncan Gilchrist, the deputy director responsible for policy; and then Lucy Appleton, the deputy director responsible for enforcement. Have I got that right, and would you like to make any opening remarks?

Baroness Sherlock

No, Chair. We are happy to answer any questions you have for us.

Chair

Thank you; that is very kind. I do not know if you managed to catch any of the evidence that the PHSO was able to provide to us specifically around complaints.

Baroness Sherlock

We got the heads up that there was evidence about complaints, but we were outside reading our papers nervously and encouraging each other, so I am afraid we did not get to hear the evidence.

Chair

All right. I will quickly say this before I ask my substantive question. There were concerns that, contrary to DWP data, the PHSO complaints are increasing. I think they have doubled over the last five years. There were concerns that this is contrary to DWP data that they were actually reducing. The comments were in relation to both administrative issues around complaints handling, particularly around complex cases, but also in terms of cultural issues. Assumptions were made about paying parents, for example. The phrase that sticks in my mind—because I think it is a really good one—is about service users being treated with respect and for the complaints handler to live in those people’s shoes, to understand where they are coming from in their dealings with them. Do you want to reflect briefly on that before we go into questions?

Baroness Sherlock

I am very happy to do that, and I might ask Simon to say a word. If two sets of officials disagree on stats, I think I may let them fight it out, if you don’t mind. There are a couple of things that are worth saying about complaints. The volume of the CMS caseload has risen quite significantly. Since 2019-20, the number of cases has gone up by about 64%. While the number of complaints is going up, relative to the caseload, that is not the case in the complaints that we see overall. Having said that, I am not being complacent. We take all complaints very seriously, and CMS regards complaints as a source of intelligence and feedback to make sure that we can learn about what happens and how we can make things better. Two things are worth noting. On complaints about the CMS, of course, the CMS—unlike most Government services—has two customers. Even if one customer is very satisfied at the result of an action by CMS, it is entirely possible that that will leave the other customer unhappy with what is there. Secondly, I take the point you make about treating customers with respect extremely seriously. I am grateful to you for putting it in that context. Simon, without delay, could you just give two minutes on how you take that seriously and what you do to make sure that our caseworkers listen to customers, understand their context and their lives, and respond appropriately?

Chair

Two minutes, if that is all right.

Simon Hunter

Absolutely. We kicked off a big piece of work in December last year that looked at quality as a whole. Certainly, some of the feedback that you gave us today around treating the case with respect and understanding the scenario—as the Minister said, all that information is rich information for us. We are doing a substantial piece of work around that. That also helps us in the telephony work that we do. This is a body of work that will take time to embed in. The feedback is really important to us. Again, it is important to stress that we have very good relationships with ICE and the PHSO. The feedback that we get is used to see how we can improve what we are doing generally. As the Minister said, feedback is really important to us. We take it incredibly seriously and we work with that to see where we can be better.

Chair

Thanks very much. On perceptions of fairness—we touched on those just now—what work would you like to highlight in terms of how you are increasing confidence so that it is not just perceptions of fairness but customers experiencing actual fairness?

Baroness Sherlock

That is an excellent place to start. First, customers’ perception of fairness and trust in the CMS will be driven by their experience of using it. The job of the organisation is to make sure that the experience is one that can inspire a sense of confidence, fairness, understanding and responsiveness, so that it is not just an administrative service. It is a challenging environment, as you know only too well. Often trust has broken down between the two parents before they ever get to use the CMS. It is therefore important that the CMS follows the rules consistently, because the two customers will have different expectations and different desires from the process, and also does it in a way that feels appropriate and responsive. One thing we have been setting out to do is to look at how to make it really clear what is going on at every stage. If you come to the service, if you are a paying parent, how do we make it clear that all the information you have given us has been taken into account? How can you see clearly on your customer account or when the caseworker talks to you why you owe what you owe, where it came from and what you need to do as a result? If you are a receiving parent and you are expecting money, when should you expect it? What do you do if it does not turn up? Who do you tell? How do we do that? A lot of work has gone into communication, into both the content and the expression, the formatting of information for customers, and also trying to drive some reform about making sure that we get better. In terms of compliance, which I am sure we will come on to, performance is better than it ever has been in a difficult environment. However, the most important thing is that it this not just about that. Our job is to get money to children—in the end, the CMS is about making sure that children get the maintenance that they are entitled to—but to do it in a way that both parents understand and feel heard and seen in that process while we employ the law consistently. That is what we are setting out to do, and that has been the purpose of the reforms.

Chair

Thinking about fairness and the trust that builds or does not build, do you think there is an acceptable level of trust among customers of the service?

Baroness Sherlock

I think it is always going to be challenging, partly for the reason, as I said, that there are two customers. I have seen cases where the CMS did all the right things. I have listened to calls. I listen into them, but not to as many as Simon, who listens to a vast number of calls. I have come to the conclusion that our job is to try to make the system as fair as it can be while recognising that child maintenance is a zero-sum game. If one parent pays more, the other one is getting more. If one parent wants more, the other one is getting less. We have to apply the law fairly. The key is to try to make sure our caseworkers are trained to understand the context in which parents are working, and a lot of work has gone into that. A lot of work has gone into quality, assurance, customer service, consistent training, and having a programme where the managers listen over and over again to calls, where team leaders work with customers to make sure that not only are they doing the right thing, which should be taken into consideration, but that parents can understand that and that they can be appropriately sympathetic or empathetic to the circumstances while not trying to say—because you cannot tell both parents they are right if they want different things. The final bit relating to the real source of trust is that CMS gets things wrong—I have seen a few cases where it got things wrong. With 820,000 cases a year, it is going to get things wrong. The most important thing is that when it does, it puts its hands up, says it has got it wrong and works out why it has got it wrong. It then puts it right and works out how it will make sure the system is improved for next time. One of the things I have been really impressed with is that this is a learning organisation. I knew some of this world from the outside. It is only when you become a Minister that you get to be a bit closer up and to peer into the darker corners. This is a very learning organisation. I find that it will absolutely say, “We messed this up. This is what we have learned from that. This is how the procedures are going on”. We have been working very hard together on continuous improvement to try to get constantly better, because I think that is the way to improve trust from customers.

Liz Twist

As I understand it, some major changes are coming up. How will the Department make sure that when cases on the direct pay service move over to the single-tier system, based on collect and pay, it is done safely, without escalating the conflict between parents?

Baroness Sherlock

That is a great question. We have come to the conclusion that this is the right thing to do. At the moment with direct pay, many of the challenges we see—and some of the complaints that you as MPs see—are with indirect pay. CMS gets the information, works out what has to happen, and parent one pays parent two. The problem is if they don’t pay. We found out from research that, quite often, they do not pay either what they should or on time. We don’t know unless one or other parent tells us, so it can go quite some time until they come into the collect and pay service, by which time arrears have built up and things have gone badly wrong. In the transition, what we will do is, first, make sure that customers get plenty of notice. The applicant, the person who applied to the CMS, will be the one we will go to first. They will be given three months’ notice. We will give really clear communications. We will help them to work out what they want to do. Are the circumstances between the parents such that they could actually make an arrangement on their own—what we call a family-based arrangement? Direct pay will have lots of parents who can get on perfectly well and do it. We could help them work out what is to be paid, give them support in making that decision, in making that arrangement, and then go off and do it. If that isn’t going to work, they need to come into the service. Therefore, we are looking really carefully at how we transition them. We are working through different ways of doing that. How do we move cases over together? Do we consider pathfinders? We are working through all that. The key will be to do advanced communication, supporting parents who want to consider a family-based arrangement, safeguards for vulnerable customers, making sure the system is ready, not rushing into it until we know the system works, and then monitoring the effects on compliance, on customers, and particularly on any vulnerable parents. We are taking that very seriously.

Liz Twist

Two things come out of that. One is the communication that we have talked about in more general terms—you said you are looking at that carefully.

Baroness Sherlock

Very carefully.

Liz Twist

The second thing is this: are pilots going on to see how this might work or are there detailed plans of implementation?

Baroness Sherlock

We are working through whether we might do pathfinders about the process. Pilots are always quite complicated in CMS because of the way the statutory service works. However, we are looking at whether or not a pathfinder is the best way to do it. We will not move all customers over on the same day, because that just isn’t how the system works, so we are looking at what is the best way to test and to learn the best way to work that out. We are also engaging with stakeholders from across the spectrum, so that going into this, we can understand the issues that parents are concerned about—receiving parents and paying parents. We are engaging with stakeholders. They have come to us wanting assurance, which is exactly the right thing to do and very helpful. We engage with parents from across the piece and listen to what they have to say—so it is about both of those things. Communication is something that CMS is working on very hard. It is going over and over it all, even just its regular letters—reviewing every single letter, looking at both the tone as well as the content, making sure that it is understood and testing how things go down. A lot more work will go into that.

Simon Hunter

Can I just add to what the Minister said about written communication? We are about to conclude a complete rewrite of all CMS letters. That started with over 500 letters and it will be concluded in January. As the Minister said, that is looking at the pitch, tone, content and making them a lot more user friendly. We have done a big piece of work there. That is another part of the communications that we have been bolstering.

Liz Twist

Thank you. Moving on to enforcement, what progress has the Department made on exploring initiatives to speed up and use enforcement powers more effectively, as it talked about in its written evidence to the Committee? Are there other particular improvements in processes that you want to see happen?

Baroness Sherlock

Yes. I will bring Lucy in in a moment. She is our enforcement person who can talk a bit more on what we are doing in that area. There have already been a number of steps that we think have made things better. We have changed the processes to make this quicker. For example, if somebody is not paying on direct pay, we will make it much quicker to be able to transfer it, collect and pay, and get there quicker. The key to it—the idea with enforcement—is that you never want to get there. What you want is early visibility. When a payment is not there, jump in quickly and get it back on track before it escalates and gets to the stage where you have to engage in enforcement. If someone does not pay, we can move in quickly and, for example, if necessary take the money out of somebody’s wages or look at other ways to get it from them. Only if that fails do you then have to move into the escalated enforcement sessions. Lucy has been working very closely on this; her background is very strong in this area. Can you give a two-minute version of what you are doing to make this faster and better, Lucy?

Lucy Appleton

Yes, of course. Our approach to enforcement is an escalated one. In the vast majority of cases, we generally don’t need to use our enforcement powers in order for paying parents to make their payments. However, there are some instances when we have to deploy them. As the Minister said, we have powers to deduct from earnings and to take money directly out of bank accounts. When we move into our legal power route we issue a liability order that we obviously need to go to the courts for. That is one place where we are really making improvements on the time that it takes to get there and then, hopefully, we will be able to prompt more voluntary compliance. We are planning to complete our legislation for admin liability orders, for example, in March and April next year. We will be able to get them out as part of the process over the summer, so we have plans on that. I have only recently joined CMS, and of course one of the first things I asked was, “How can we improve this process to get there quicker?” We have negotiated additional court slots with HMCTS, and we are already starting to see the real benefit from that in actually being able to speed up the process of getting liability orders into court. That is one of the initial things that we have done and, hopefully, our customers will start to see the benefits. We are doing other things around the use of predictive analytics, for example. Our early intervention team was launched last year, in 2025. We use predictive analytics to look for patterns in customers’ behaviours that imply that somebody might be about to go non-compliant. That team can reach out to those customers and say, “What can we do to help you?” That is proving very successful so far.

Baroness Sherlock

That is really helpful. We work on the assumption that most parents want to do the right thing by their kids, so our job is to make it as easy as possible to do that. For the small minority that really don’t want to, the CMS’s job is to step in and say, “I am sorry, but however difficult things are, you have to pay for your children”—but most paying parents want to do that. The predictive analysis is a good example. Sometimes it is about something changing in someone’s life that can disrupt the payment. You may change jobs. Something happens, and that can be disruptive. If you can step in before things go wrong, it is much easier to stop it going down. Chair, the final thing I want you and Ms Twist to know is that in the year to June 2026, the CMS collected £235 million via enforcement, so it is not that it is not working. There was £1.7 billion overall in the year, but it did collect £235 million via enforcement in that year. An awful lot of money is being collected. We are looking at ratcheting up improvements stage by stage. I have come to the view that there are some big things that we have to change, like collect and pay, because there is only so far we will ever be able to go if—like indirect pay—you cannot see what is going on, which means that it all goes badly wrong before you can pick it up. After that, it is a bit like British cycling. You don’t need just a better bike. It is about an accretion of small gains. You need to make all the things better—you need to make the operations better, the communications better, the casebook better. You need to make it easy at all the stages. In the end, that is what will transform the experience of customers and get money to kids.

Patrick Hurley

You mentioned trying to get better communication. Could you talk me through how you are trying to improve communication specifically with parents?

Baroness Sherlock

I think the big thing has been what Simon said about going through all the letters. I know 500 letters sounds like a lot, but with 820,000 cases and almost twice as many customers, there are so many different circumstances that need to be covered. Going through those letters, retiring the ones that are no longer needed, and making sure that the rest are clear is key. For me, probably the single biggest change will be about communicating the things that matter most to the customer. This is what they most want to know: how much do I owe? How much am I owed? Why? Where did it come from? And how do I pay it? A lot of work has gone into developing a system, as I touched on. For example, we now have “my child maintenance case”. A lot of parents now use CMS mostly online: 80% of customers only use CMS online. About another 14% do online and phone, and 6% just do phone. I am not surprised because, for DWP, this demographic skews young because they have kids, so they are probably more used to using online things in other parts of their lives. A lot of people will only be communicating with CMS via the online service. Therefore, it is really important that when you log on to “my child maintenance case”, you need to see what is there and find out what has happened. There are really complicated cases that you will see in casework, and one of the reasons is that these cases could go back 15 years, during which somebody may have changed jobs repeatedly, new children may have been born, parents may have separated and they may have re-partnered with somebody else. Each time one of those things happens, the whole assessment has to be redone if it is relevant, both parents are written out to, the amount of money changes and you start again. If there are arrears, that builds up. What we need is for parents logging on to be able to see clearly, “This is how much I owe. That is because of shared care. That is because of my job. It changed. That is because this happened at that point or that happened.” If we can make it clearer for them, that will help the perception of fairness and their understanding of the system. Equally, that makes it easier for our caseworkers, because if someone phones up, they have to go all the way back through. If they can see information clearly, they can explain it to customers on the phone, so that is one of the key points. The other bit is what the Chair touched on, which is about making sure our caseworkers, all our staff, are engaging with respect and understanding customers, because, in the end, it isn’t just a sum. These are your kids. It is your life. At the point at which you come to us, the whole thing is just falling apart, which is terrible. Therefore, we need to have empathy and understanding of that. I talk to loads of CMS staff and they are good people. They really get this. Our job is to support them and make sure it is consistent and they can explain things well, with appropriate levels of empathy and support for customers. Sorry, I could go on, so stop me.

Patrick Hurley

We all know it is a difficult time of life for a lot of the people you interact with, and that an emotionally intelligent approach is key. Even though the demographic might be used to dealing with online dashboards and that way of interacting with the state, when people are going through difficult periods in their life, they might value phone support or face-to-face interaction. Even though people might ordinarily want to interact online, what provision is there around the edges and on the margins, where people might need a bit more focused and dedicated support?

Baroness Sherlock

I will ask Simon to answer that in a minute, but from my end, first, you are absolutely right. One of the reasons that we have put so much work into making sure that the online system works well is that there are lots of things that customers want to do that are relatively straightforward. You want to report a change of circumstance, something has happened, you have had a change of income, you have had a change in your family—these things are relatively straightforward. Those are much quicker to do online and are actioned much quicker. It is much more straightforward. The other great advantage is that it frees up our staff to talk to the customers who either cannot or will not use digital or who want to have a conversation with a real human being who will understand their circumstances. Therefore, what we are trying to do is digital where it is appropriate, but phone is always there. Simon, do you want to pick up?

Simon Hunter

Yes. What the Minister said is absolutely right. We need to have digital channels at a standard that delivers what people want, but we have never, ever changed our emphasis in terms of being a multi-channel organisation. If customers want to ring us, we take quite a lot of pride and satisfaction in having a telephony service that is always improving. I alluded before to the quality assurance framework. We introduced a new quality assurance framework in December last year, which is making sure that customers who contact us via that telephony channel get a service to a standard that we expect. So the communication channel that you mentioned before is really important. Another addition is that customers and colleagues alike told us that they liked the idea of being able to message us, so we introduced technology called Customer Connect. Customers who are using our digital channel can also do two-way messaging with us. Customers and colleagues asked us for that and we brought it in. The challenge around communication is important, but we are doing a huge amount in this space to improve the communication as best as we possibly can.

Patrick Hurley

How about face-to-face interaction? Is there a facility there?

Baroness Sherlock

There isn’t, and it is a real challenge. It is partly the scale of CMS. If you have 820,000 cases and almost twice as many customers across Great Britain, being able to offer a consistent and efficient service across the entire country on that scale is something where, in the end, we have decided the combination of digital and phone is important. However, one of the things we work with our colleagues in CMS on is making sure that parents who, sometimes when they are having a conversation—I listen to calls. Obviously, some of what is there is not CMS business, but it is really important to that parent because life is complex and you don’t separate out the bit that is to do with your maintenance. Our caseworkers have a clear toolkit where they can refer people to local support, or they can signpost them to local support rather than referring if there are things that they need. If they have particular issues, we are very happy to do that. We are also looking at how we might be able, for example, to use things like family hubs or other local services so that CMS information and support can be directed through those, even if we cannot see them face to face.

Chair

Can I just follow that up? First of all, on Customer Connect, is that a person or a bot?

Simon Hunter

No, it is a real person.

Chair

It is a real person who is responding to that?

Simon Hunter

It is a real person, yes.

Chair

In terms of communicating, how is the system able to respond to the complexities that we have heard about? I understand the point that the Minister is making. Most of the cases are fairly straightforward and can be dealt with online, but how do the different elements that you have now—including the one that you just mentioned—cope with the complexities of people’s lives?

Simon Hunter

The objective of digital, as the Minister says, is to be able to deal with that easier stuff, but obviously stuff comes out on the back of that, which is the more complex stuff that the system cannot do or is not automated. In terms of the approach that we take internally, we do outbound calls to the customer. We might receive a piece of work that is received through the online portal, but there needs to be a follow-up conversation from a caseworker. In some cases, through the technology that I mentioned, Customer Connect, there is that interaction between the customer and ourselves via that two-way messaging. In some cases, because of the complex nature of a particular case or because there is something that we need to address, we will just make an outbound call and speak to the customer in person. I think that differential is important. We now find that the telephony volume that we get is more complex stuff that you cannot necessarily do online. We have a very proactive approach from our caseworkers where, if we need to contact the customer to get more information or understand more to help us resolve the problems in the case, we will do that. We will communicate with the customer to try to get the information or have that conversation where we can.

Andrew Pakes

I have a quick follow-up on how you will measure future success. As MPs, we all will deal with cases at the edges of the process, late in the day. In places like mine, lots of that will involve people whose first language is not English, so the mix between digital reading and phone is difficult. I do lots of work—both constituency-wise and because of my hearing—with the deaf community, where the phone may not be the right way. What impact assessment or learning will you do about the different communities and parents you are dealing with to ensure that accessibility is equal across the different needs of people?

Baroness Sherlock

I will ask someone to explain the support we can give in, for example, translation services. Just yesterday, I was listening to some CMS calls. One came from—I will not be too specific—a customer who had a visual impairment. I was really impressed that the caseworker just talked it through with the customer. When somebody first makes an application, they will be asked, “Can we talk?” They will often do it on the phone or in whatever way they do it. We will ask them, “Do you have any particular needs? Do you have any disabilities or any communication needs? Is there anything in particular that we need to know about your circumstances?” It can then be tailored. In this case, the caseworker was careful to ask, quite specifically, “What can and can’t you do? What is useful? What is helpful?” They then looked at the best way to handle their case—“Does someone normally work with you on your case? Can we support you to use the service online? Do you want to do it on the phone? This is how you do it. What format can we give you documentation in?” They went through that. That is part of the training for caseworkers to understand that customers will come with a range of needs. Simon, do you want to—

Simon Hunter

I think you have encompassed it. Obviously, as part of the wider DWP, we lean into the wider DWP in terms of how we generally handle the different customer characteristics and make sure the support is there for people who need us, and how we need to tailor that to the individual cases. In that regard, we are pretty strong and we provide the necessary support.

Baroness Sherlock

If you found that we are not doing that or there is something else, please let me know, because that is really helpful. We like to think we have it all set up, but there may be something where it gets through and, like any case, if we get it wrong, I want to know about it. If you find such cases, that is particularly helpful. If you have a fairly diverse constituency and things come through, I would be really grateful.

Andrew Pakes

It is about reassurance that we are getting it right by design, because the patchwork has been uneven. I know the Department has put some investment into deaf-blind interpreters to help that particular user group, which is important in a constituency like mine. But it is about reassuring us that different user groups and different representative groups are involved in the design phase rather than mopping up if things are missed.

Baroness Sherlock

That is really helpful; I will make sure we do that.

Chair

Given that we are currently going through a co-design, co-production approach in the Timms review, it would be very interesting to see how, in terms of how we improve the customer’s journey, you are thinking about accessible needs and the point that Andrew just made about deaf people. Obviously, telephony is not the best approach there, so what else do you provide? It would be very useful if you wrote to us.

Baroness Sherlock

I am very happy to write to you on that point. One final point is that we work with a range of stakeholders. For example, we have been refreshing repeatedly our training on dealing with customers who have experienced domestic abuse. I have had some helpful workshops with a range of organisations, and no matter how much you think you’ve thought of everything, there are always other things to think about and other ways to improve. But we are very happy to write to you on that specific point.

Chair

We will come back to that one.

Liz Twist

My question is about the relationship between Child Maintenance Service and the family court. We have heard evidence that a lot of families may have conflicting experiences with the conflicting responsibilities of the two courts. What scope do you see for DWP to undertake work with the Ministry of Justice to understand the common issues that arise for parents interacting with the CMS and the family court on maintenance and what used to be called contact orders?

Baroness Sherlock

Again, that is a great question. One of the things that we—that I—spend quite a bit of time doing is having to explain, not to you but to other audiences, the distinct roles of the CMS and the family court. They have distinct roles and operate under distinct legislative frameworks. On the one hand, CMS is a rules-based statutory service designed to calculate across a large caseload, whereas the family court inevitably is more focused on individual cases. However, it is not that the two have no connection at all, and we are working quite closely with the Ministry of Justice. For example, the MOJ is developing some digital tools to support parents in post-separation conflict. We are engaging with them and looking at how the work we do in supporting parents to make arrangements can dovetail with them and align well. I have met them—I have met my counterpart Minister in MOJ on the family justice side and we are meeting again shortly to discuss how we can make sure what we do does not fight and aligns well, while recognising that they have distinct roles. With the CMS, of course, it is not that there is no connection. If people go to the family court and they come, for example, with a court order, CMS can and does take account of court orders or other official documents and the range of evidence in making a decision, for example, around shared care. In the end, however, it will have to make it the way Parliament has prescribed it. It will have to make it along the lines of the law around child maintenance. Just to reassure you, however, we talk to MOJ and we recognise that we overlap to some degree in the same space, but it is really important that we make it clear that we are doing different things. For example, on contact, it is not the job of CMS to say that. Contact must be about the best interests of the child; it is not for the CMS to decide that. It is for the CMS in law to recognise where the child spends their time and how that should impact the amount of maintenance that is paid.

Liz Twist

Do you think there more work could be done at a local level? You are having discussions nationally. How will that filter down? Clearly, the child arrangements orders will have an impact, as you said, on the child maintenance side. Do you think more work could be done on the ground?

Baroness Sherlock

In a sense, we are tiptoeing along a line. The independence of the courts is something that they value and we respect fully. I have certainly heard, indeed from evidence to yourselves, the suggestion that there is not enough understanding in some parts of the judicial system about the way that CMS works. I am going to reflect on that and see what more we could do to make sure that there is a full understanding about the distinct roles of the two public services. I think that is probably the most useful one. There are places where they meet in practice. I mentioned family hubs earlier. CMS clearly has to be quite careful about its boundaries—it is not a relationship support service, but we have, for example, done some work around reducing parental conflict, where we have worked with services working inside family hubs, and we are looking at that. We and MOJ share the objective of trying to make that post-separation process as good for the children as it can be. In the end, this is about the kids. Parental conflict impacts on children, and anything that any of us can do to try to make that better in our own lanes, while making sure we are aligned, will make things better. I have heard that. I picked that up from the evidence to you, and I am very happy for us to look into what more we could do to make sure there is understanding across the piece.

Chair

I think that is a really good point. This was highlighted in our second evidence session. I think it is about the understanding not just between stakeholders, but of service users, of customers. If somebody is going to court, you might want to look at ensuring they understand the CMS’s role and vice versa, because sometimes they go down a path and from the evidence we have received were not aware of how they impacted on each other. I am going to ask a question on safeguarding. You will be aware that the Committee has done a huge amount of work around safeguarding within DWP as a whole. We were quite surprised, in other spheres of DWP, about the lack of awareness of domestic abuse and how that affects customers, service users. You have mentioned that you just had a workshop to try to understand this. We wanted to make sure and be reassured that this is being considered. You will be aware that the Department now reports annually on the deaths of claimants, and we know that the reported number is just the tip of the iceberg. The figure also included service users of the CMS in recent years. We must be mindful of that and do whatever we can to safeguard paying parents and receiving parents to the same extent. Would you like to explain what you are doing, particularly around service users who may have been abused, and more generally as well?

Baroness Sherlock

Of course, Chair. I am very much aware of your interest in this, as well as the work that you have done with the Department and that the Committee has done over some time in exploring this. First, I reassure the Committee that the Child Maintenance Service takes the issue of safeguarding in general, and domestic abuse in particular, extremely seriously. Safeguarding is embedded at the heart of CMS’s processes. Because of its nature, family break-up is emotionally fraught, and almost by definition, for a significant number of customers, at the point at which they come to use the CMS their circumstances will always be very challenging. It is incredibly important to CMS to make sure that everything about the system is appropriate and that our colleagues who talk and engage with customers understand that. I will ask Simon to explain more specifically what he is doing, but we make sure that all our colleagues are trained in domestic abuse. They understand that and they have all been trained. They all receive training every two years, and in the intervening year, they get a refresher to make sure that they are still across this. It is really important that we help them to understand that. We also make sure—

Chair

Is that compulsory, Minister?

Baroness Sherlock

Yes. All CMS—in fact, I think you guys have done it as well, haven’t you? It is not just frontline customers. I have even looked at the training myself. I am not going to say that I sat down and did the whole thing because that is not my day job, but even I have looked at it. It is taken extremely seriously. When I say we are working on it at the moment, we are refreshing the training. It is not that we are creating the training. This is an organisation that believes in continuous improvement. We want to keep getting better. The truth is that understanding different aspects of abuse evolves over time. We know from engaging with stakeholders that there are either different forms of abuse or just different ways of understanding how it can happen in practice. I really want to reassure you on that count. The workshop we held recently was with 17 stakeholder organisations. They still came up with ways in which we could make it better—each time we adapt it. So that is something we are really committed to. On the wider question of safeguarding, we recognise that some of the customers coming to us have extremely difficult personal circumstances, and some may be experiencing emotional distress. Again, the training of colleagues is clear. In the same way that we train them to look out for the signs of domestic abuse—because not all customers will want to disclose it to us, and that is their right—we also train colleagues to look out for the signs that a customer may be in distress, or particularly if there is any risk that they may harm themselves in some way. They have a clear protocol. They are supported. Simon can talk you through it. They are trained in what to do in those circumstances, and to look carefully, and to get the help. Simon, do you want to explain how we embed safeguarding in that way?

Simon Hunter

Yes. Again, in terms of giving you the confidence and reassurance that you need, we undertook a domestic abuse discovery piece of work, which ran from May to September. Part of the feedback—as the Minister said, from the 17 specialist organisations there—was to help us redesign the training that we do for our colleagues. We received some rich feedback from those sessions and, essentially, we have just relaunched that training. The training, for example, incorporates trauma-informed training. Again, the information we got from those stakeholders was key. We launched that training and it goes live this month. What we want to do there, in terms of making sure everyone in the organisation gets captured by the new training, is ensure that they will get put through an enhanced module specific to that, so that there is no gap. A recent thing that has been launched is our safeguarding gateway. That was launched on Monday this week. Again, I have been on that myself and it is a really easy resource. If you are a colleague, it basically gives you what you need to do in certain circumstances. The resources that we give to colleagues are important and the training we give them is key. As the Minister said, domestic abuse training happens every two years with a refresher in the intervening year—that is important—and it includes a knowledge checker. We now have enhanced training, which is as a consequence of the feedback we had from the 17 specialist organisations. Another thing that is important here is the quality assurance framework that I mentioned. The standards are embedded in the framework in terms of what we look out for, in relation to what we needed to do around safeguarding domestic abuse. In the year to date, we have listened to over 60,000 calls. There is a lot of information there, which means that we can make sure that our colleagues are doing what we need them to do. We are doing lots of good stuff in this space to make a difference.

Steve Darling

I want to go off on a slight tangent in the light of some comments that the Minister made. Thank you to you and your team for coming along today. Repeatedly, there has been talk of the direct payment system and things going wrong with it—collect and pay being a system where payees and the organisation know where you are a lot more. Gingerbread is keen to see the shift of all cases to collect and pay and the ending of direct payments. What are your thoughts on that, Minister?

Baroness Sherlock

As a Government, we consulted on this—indeed, the previous Government consulted on it and I extended the consultation when I became the Minister. Having reflected on the responses and all the evidence, I have concluded that the right thing to do is to remove direct pay and to move all cases over to collect and pay, or to make collect and pay the only service that the CMS offers, for the reasons I touched on earlier, which I will not rehearse again. However, the customers have to have a choice, and direct pay will consist of a mix. There will be customers for whom it works perfectly well, and a family-based arrangement between the two parents with the right support may be the right thing. If that does not work, however, or if they simply want a service where they have more confidence that it will be handled without them having to engage with each other for all kinds of reasons, which may be about safety but may just be preference, then, if they are going to come into the system, we want them to come into collect and pay, where it is really visible. If a payment is not made, we can see straight away that it is not made and intervene in the ways that Lucy described earlier, so we can get things back on track as fast as possible. Sorry, I am clearly not answering your question—try me again.

Steve Darling

Are you going to close down direct payment completely, because I know that is what Gingerbread would like, and just have collect and pay because you know exactly where you are?

Baroness Sherlock

Just to be clear, yes, we are. That was what was proposed by the previous Government and by us.

Steve Darling

What is the timescale? The worrying thing is that while there is the aspiration–and particularly if there is a general election in December—what timescale do you have programmed in for starting the process of making that quite significant change?

Baroness Sherlock

Chair, for the record, I have no belief that there will be a general election in December. I just want to make that clear—I did not say that. To be clear, the process I have described is actually a major change. It was committed to by the previous Government and by this Government, but it will need primary legislation and a massive overhaul of CMS’s processes and communications. The entire system will be changing. The first step is that we have to get primary legislation, so we need a primary legislation vehicle. When parliamentary time can be found—obviously, we are waiting to find out what will happen in the next parliamentary session—we will take legislation forward. That is all I can say. I think colleagues here all know how the system works—everybody wants legislation, we all want it tomorrow, and we all get it when we get it. However, the Government have made clear their commitment to doing this. The previous Government committed to it. I certainly could not comment on a subsequent Parliament. I have my preferences of what it might look like, though obviously I could not commit that to anything, but I can simply say that this Government and the last one did say yes.

Steve Darling

Fair enough. I come to my real question now. Internal process reviews have highlighted where people were in payment and they were talking about doing harm to themselves. We heard good messaging from yourselves around safeguarding training, but those internal process reviews are turning up where that is not actually happening. What is going wrong there and how are you ensuring that that learning happens? It goes back to once upon a time, when I visited my local DWP office and they said, “Oh yes, I know all about trauma-informed”, and one of the coaching members of staff said, “I know who to refer them to”—and you think that is probably not the level that we want you at. What lessons are we learning from those reviews?

Baroness Sherlock

The internal process reviews—whenever we become aware of the death of a customer, obviously there will be an independent review that looks at all the evidence. In DWP, they would mostly not be about child maintenance. There are not that many of them, but they would not normally have come about through child maintenance. However, CMS is never complacent about this. One of the things that Simon touched on is that we have a six-point plan for colleagues. It is not just about referral. Simon, do you want to read them out? I learned the six points but I always forget one. Essentially, colleagues are trained as to what to do. You have to listen out for the information, identify it, get support, report it, escalate it and go through the stages. To be clear, sometimes at the stage at which people engage with the Child Maintenance Service, they may be in significant distress and there is only so much that a Government service can do to identify that or react. However, we want to try to do anything that is within our gift. We want to make sure that our processes are as sensitive to that as they can be. With CMS, things do go wrong, and I see complaints. The one thing I want to assure you of is that if we see things go wrong in any part of the service, the key is to make sure we learn from that and get that better. We cannot stop all problems and make everything better, but we can look at our own responsibilities where we think, for example, our services are hard to use or we want to make sure someone can get through to a human being. We will do that. We are now at the stage that if somebody wants to phone us up, the average wait time is 11 minutes. That has improved a lot. I used to get letters complaining of very long wait times. I do not get those very much any more. The key for us is to look at our process. On trauma-informed training, I was talking to the colleague who leads on this recently in the Department. It is as much about design—thinking about things at the design stage—and being aware of the impact, but in the end, CMS has to do tough things, and it just has to do them as safely as it can. Simon, what are the six points?

Simon Hunter

I will come to the six points, but I want to make the quick point that when we have done the safeguarding training—that is, DWP-led safeguarding training—we have put all our leaders through the training first. The vast majority of our leaders have been through it and we have used some of the IPR information to inform that training to help them with how we coach our colleagues. Yes, the six-point plan is: No. 1—take the statement seriously; No. 2—summon a colleague to act as support; No. 3—gather information to gauge the level of risk; No. 4—provide a referral and referral advice; No. 5—summon emergency help; and No. 6—review the incident. Colleagues have a clear six-point plan. I mentioned the safeguarding framework. Those resources are within that, so it is in a very easy place to find. The six-point plan is something that we brief comprehensively.

Steve Darling

That is helpful. Thank you.

Mr Peter Bedford

Turning to affordability, in previous sessions we have heard from the Department that the child maintenance calculation is designed to be affordable for paying parents, but given the history of that calculation, in terms of the 1998 thresholds, using gross income, arguably it hits those on low earnings disproportionately and often makes it unaffordable for them to pay. Could you give me your thoughts on that and why the Department is sticking by its position on this?

Baroness Sherlock

There are a couple of things embedded in that. First, let me deal with the gross income point because this comes up quite often. There are two ways to do this. You can assess on gross income or you can assess on net income and you simply would set the rates to take account of that. I think that is often not understood. A previous system had used net income and then you would set the rates to take account of the fact that obviously it is net income. The big problem if you go for net income, as previous Administrations found, is that it just caused lots of instability and uncertainty and movement around rates, whereas gross taxable income is a clear and unambiguous basis on which to make a judgment. On affordability, one of the benefits of the system is that the key—the biggest driver—for most paying parents is simply that you pay a percentage of your income. If your income goes down, so, too, does the percentage, and if your income goes up, so, too, does the percentage. The reason behind that is that the whole point of CMS is that it is there to get money to kids or, crucially, to make sure that the children continue to benefit from the income of both parents even if the parents have chosen to live apart. Obviously, if they were still both living with their child and their income went up, the child would benefit from the income of both parents or, again, if they were living together and the income went down, the child would have to bear the consequences of their household income going down. Broadly speaking, it tracks that. You make an assessment once a year and it is reviewed after a year, and in that year, the assessment will only change if the paying parent’s income has moved up or down by more than 25%. I felt when we reviewed the calculation that that was too much—that your income could rise or, say, fall by 24% and your child maintenance would not change at all until your next annual review. I have decided that I am going to reduce that to 15%. I am trying to find a sweet spot. If it is too low, even small changes in income mean that the receiving parent could find their payments moving around too quickly, but if it is too big, it is too tough on the paying parent if the income drops down. I think 15% is a good sweet spot so I made a decision to do that. I think that will help with affordability in those cases where people’s income falls. Does that help?

Mr Peter Bedford

You mentioned that the child should benefit from the income of both parents, but that has not been incorporated in the affordability calculation. Previously, the Work and Pensions Committee—before my time on it—recommended that the calculation took into account the income of both parents. I think earlier this year, back in June, this was raised again at Committee and the Department said that it was not looking at doing so because it would be overly burdensome administratively. What are your thoughts on that?

Baroness Sherlock

I might ask Duncan to respond because he has done a lot of thinking about this. When we were doing the reviewing of the calculation, we did look at this. Just briefly, I did not talk about affordability for both parents. I talked about the child benefiting from the income of both parents. By definition, the child with whom the parent is primarily living of course is benefiting from all that parent’s income, or lack of, because they are living in that household, assuming that they are living primarily with one parent. It is really about trying to make sure of an appropriate balance, and that they benefit from the incomes of both parents. Duncan, do you want to say a word about how we reflected on this?

Duncan Gilchrist

Yes. Effectively, the fundamental point of the CMS—the reason we brought it in in place of the courts—was because if you are going to handle a very big caseload, you need to smooth out some of the differences; you need to pick and choose the changes that you are going to action. You are always making a balance in the regulatory framework around it, trying to get the right changes that will make the most difference to most people while not doing so many changes that will mean that the cases then become aged and you fall into the trap that the CSA did when it was first launched, which is that you cannot keep up with the workload and you end up in a situation where lots of people get no maintenance because you are not able to work the cases properly.

Mr Peter Bedford

That sounds like more of a Department problem, in that you are looking at what your capacity is rather than what the problem is.

Duncan Gilchrist

I think it is a societal problem. I mean that there is no society that I am aware of that operates a complete court-based system that looks at every case where they are getting particularly good results. In 2022, the Irish did a study of their system, which is the court-based system that we had prior to bringing in the CSA first. The majority report that came out of that review was that in order to increase the number of people getting maintenance, they needed to move to a more agency-based approach. Yes, you could pour as many people as you wanted to into the CSA and they could deal with whatever changes you wanted, but in a real world, where we have the Government having to make sensible prioritisation decisions, you cannot have a system that is as sensitive as the courts are to every single change.

Baroness Sherlock

Can I just clarify two things? I think there are two questions here about the principle of how it is structured and the operation of it. On the principle, what I was trying to explain—probably not very well—is that the CSA was set up to do one job, and that job is to make sure that the child benefits from the incomes of both parents. By definition, the child is already benefiting from the income of the parent with whom the child is living. The parent is feeding, housing and clothing the child—providing for the child. The point of the Child Maintenance Service is that it is not primarily there to level things between the parents. The job it was given is to make sure the child benefits from both parents, based on an assumption that both parents continue to retain responsibility for the children even if they have separated and their relationship has come to an end. The job of the CMS is specifically to add into that household an appropriate amount of money from the parent who is not the primary carer of the child in order that the child benefits from both parents’ incomes. In my experience, for a lot of families, even if—and it will be unusual—you had an extremely wealthy receiving parent and sometimes a much less wealthy paying parent, I have talked to plenty of people who would say, “I want to contribute to my child”. It is not just about whether the household needs it—“I want to contribute to my child”. I think that is appropriate.

Mr Peter Bedford

Before this evidence session, I said to my team, “Can you produce a list for me of all the CMS cases you have that we have problems with?” There are pages and pages of them. I will not read them all out now but there are a lot. In terms of the example you gave about a high earner, a man earns less than the ex-wife, the ex-wife has several properties, and the teenage child stays with him two nights a week. He is paying his ex-wife £700 a month, which is a significant part of his earnings. He is a very low-income person. The ex-wife clearly has a lot of capital, a lot of income elsewhere. He is now basically pushed and on the verge of suicide because of the financial pressures they are putting on him. I guess the point I am making is that it does not take into account the income of both sides, or both parties, and typically it is the man who is the paying parent, so it is pushing a lot of people into distress and particularly resulting in mental health issues as well. My inbox is full of cases like this.

Baroness Sherlock

I read the complaints that come in from MPs, but I just wanted to say two quick things. One is that the cases that you see are the most complex, the most difficult. You know this from elsewhere in your postbags. The overwhelming number of cases work straightforwardly. Secondly, obviously, I cannot comment on this case but I am very sorry to hear that somebody feels that they are at risk of suicide, and obviously, you will have your own ways of dealing with that, but we would never want to see that. But just to come back to the bad example, the affordability of what the paying parent will pay is based on his income. It is not anything to do with her income; it is based on his income. So in a sense, it would not matter. The impact on his finances would not be affected by whether or not the other parent had plenty of money or not enough money. Can I just finish the point? Parliament set the system up back in 2012 on the assumption that both parents retain responsibility for supporting the child, and therefore that is all the system is set up to do. However, for example, if there is shared care, the system takes account of that. If the child stays with him for some certain nights a week, he pays less because it is recognised that he is bearing some of the costs of that child. This is about them contributing to the cost of the child. It is not about their respective financial circumstances.

Mr Peter Bedford

I do not think it is disputed that both parents should be contributing, but I think it is about the way the system you described—the system that we have. There was due to be a consultation, I think, following the previous iteration of this Committee, which was cancelled. I am not clear about why that was cancelled, or the evidence that the Department used to cancel that consultation—

Duncan Gilchrist

Shall I—

Baroness Sherlock

Please do, yes.

Duncan Gilchrist

There are a number of reasons why it was cancelled, but perhaps we can look at low-income paying parents in particular. We asked low-income paying parents and receiving parents from relatively low incomes how they would feel about a change that, broadly speaking, brought the calculation up to date—in other words, pushed up the threshold for the flat rate and therefore the other thresholds, which would then reduce the amount that paying parents on low incomes would pay and reduce the amount that receiving parents on low incomes would receive. The feedback we got—that research has been published if the Committee wants to go over it; I will not give you the figures now—from paying parents was that a large number felt that this reduction would not really make much difference to them. A number of paying parents were concerned about the impact this would have on their children, and receiving parents felt that this would be quite damaging for them. In other words, essentially we got a big no in the research from the parents who would be affected by this.

Mr Peter Bedford

That was research prior to the consultation, so that was almost like a pre-consultation consultation, based on some research.

Baroness Sherlock

That was a ministerial decision, so let me take responsibility for that. We deliberately set out to get evidence because we wanted to understand the impact on paying parents and receiving parents of any changes to the system. As I said, because it is a zero-sum game every single change we make will have an effect right across the piece. If one paying parent pays less, out there somewhere is a receiving parent who is getting less money in to pay for the child. Conversely, if a receiving parent wants more maintenance, which they generally do, that means that out there a paying parent will have to pay more. We looked across the piece at the impact of that. We also looked at the way the system works at the moment. We looked at administrative evidence. We did evidence reviews. We talked to stakeholders, and then in the round we made a decision. Was this the moment to make wholesale changes to the system in the middle of a cost of living pressure time? We did not feel the evidence for that was there. Our driver was: will this improve compliance, improve fairness and get in more money to children? They were the criteria by which I judged it. Would it do those things? The evidence did not suggest that wholesale change to the actual calculation would do those things. Where the evidence was clear, we followed it, which is why, as I said, I have decided to reduce the income threshold from 25% down to 15%, which is something we have often been asked for. I have also often been asked why, if somebody has income that is not wages, you cannot take account of that. I have also made a decision that other forms of unearned income will be incorporated in the calculation again. The aim of those two things together is that the calculation will more accurately reflect the genuine income that is being assessed—both its current level and its combination of sources. That is what we set out to do. We went where the evidence led and that is where the evidence led, which is why I made the decision.

Chair

We will move on now, Peter, if that is okay.

Mr Peter Bedford

I do not think this issue is going away, and I think it will continue to be on the political agenda. I would implore the Department to look at this again. Thank you.

Chair

Thank you, Peter.

John Milne

Before I get to my main question, and following on from Peter, repeatedly during this inquiry there has been terrific discrepancy between what we hear from CMS and our lived experience from our constituency casework. May I write to you afterwards with some, because I think the detail is a very good test of the theory? You have a great theory, and then you see what is happening on the ground and it appears to contradict some of these things, but we do not have time for it now.

Baroness Sherlock

I will say two quick things. First, please do. In case you have not heard, I also do regular CMS surgeries for MPs. It is obviously not for me to intervene in individual cases, but what I do is I invite you to come in and tell me what you are seeing and I look at any patterns and thresholds. I go off and look into all those. I have a spreadsheet of everything that has ever been raised with me by an MP. I go off and interrogate it and find out what is happening, so I am really up for hearing this. One thing I would say is that the vast majority of complaints about CMS now come through MPs, so it is not that you are seeing the tip of an iceberg and everything else is also terrible. Mostly, it works well. You see really hard cases. Sometimes we get it wrong, and we need to get better at doing that. I am committed to doing that, but I would not want you to go away thinking that this is all terrible because it honestly, genuinely is not. Now the question, sorry.

John Milne

Thank you very much. DWP said in its written evidence that the child maintenance calculation represents the amount of money, and I quote, “that a paying parent would spend on the child if they were still living with them”. That assumption, the workings of it, I believe dates from the 1990s. Do you think it needs updating? Do you think it is still appropriate?

Baroness Sherlock

The system was originally based—Duncan can explain the background on this—on the cost of raising a child, but of course the way it cashes out in practice is overwhelming. It is related to percentage of income, and the percentages are still there, even as people’s incomes have gone up and down. In fact, the amounts of money changing hands have carried on going with that original calculation. Although it has not changed the system, in practice, the amounts of money changing hands through maintenance as a percentage has carried on broadly being the same proportion of somebody’s income that was there. It is based on the assumption that when you are living with a child, if your household income is smaller, less money will get spent on the child. If your household income is larger, more money will get spent on the child. It is not just about what is the bare minimum a child needs to have to not be going barefoot. It is about what is an appropriate amount for both parents to pay to make sure that the child carries on benefiting from both parents’ income. Duncan, do you want to add to that?

Duncan Gilchrist

Just to say that we looked at that in the research, and you are right: it has been 25 years. There are some changes. They are not enormous but, broadly speaking, the main difference is we believe that the costs of two and three children have probably increased compared with one child in the period since the last lot of research was done.

John Milne

So it is your view, then, that broadly that is still a reasonable or effective assessment or basis for that?

Duncan Gilchrist

Absolutely.

John Milne

Are you concerned about the interaction between some of your calculations and demands on behaviour? For example, you talked about the number of nights a week a child stays with a parent. That interacts with behaviours and can be weaponised, because there is a financial incentive to have more nights with yourself as opposed to your estranged partner. Are you concerned about that, that the calculation is actually leading to this—or it can do—being weaponised?

Baroness Sherlock

I think the aim of the shared care part of the calculation is the need to find some reasonably consistent way of reflecting the circumstances when care is shared. It is not the majority. I think only about a quarter of parents using the service have shared care, but in those cases we need to find some way of reflecting on it. In the end, the CMS cannot make a judgment based on the motivations of parents. It cannot look into people’s souls. It simply has to apply the law as Parliament set it out, and Parliament set it out in that way. I think we have to trust that the majority of parents want the best for their children. The system couldn’t not take account of that, because that would be unfair. It would then leave parents who were, say, taking the child for two or three nights a week having to bear some of the costs and yet still also having to pay the other parent to do it. We looked at different countries around the world, and we did not think any system had found the perfect way to do this. In as much as one has to find a proxy for shared care, this feels like the nearest proxy that we found, so that is why we are applying it, but we are applying it sensitively. It is up to the courts, as I was discussing earlier with Liz, to decide how contact should be arranged or how care should be distributed. The way Parliament set CMS up, it gave it the job of reflecting what was actually done, not what should happen, and it has to stay in its lane in that. We could not ask our staff to be making the judgment of Solomon as to where a child should be. All it can do is ask both parents for evidence, look at a full range of evidence, and if it comes to the conclusion that both overnight and day-to-day care are completely equal, then nobody pays anybody anything.

John Milne

Thank you very much.

Chair

Thank you. That concludes our evidence session this morning. I thank Baroness Sherlock for coming to see us today with her officials.