Work and Pensions Committee

Wednesday 28th October 2026

(began 14 hours, 38 minutes ago)

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09:38
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Thank you and thank you, chair. Thank you. Committee. So I think it's perhaps helpful to say right at the start that the Ombudsman comes right at the end of the process. So by definition, a parent who is complaining will have been through two stages of complaint process and the good work that our colleagues at Ice do before they come to us. But nonetheless, as you say, chair, it is remarkable that although we observe that DWP says that CM's complaints have declined, that ours have over four years doubled. Now we are still, I'm afraid I have no firm evidence as to what might be driving that.

 But we do think that there's some element of complaints not being handled effectively by definition. And there's that compound of if you've been through two stages and then you go to Ice, the independent complaint examiner, and then you come, you're still not satisfied. You come to us. I should set it in the context of, however, we are doing some wider research on the general increase in complaints across all public services. We ourselves are seeing something like a 2,025% increase in complaints coming to us, and our analysis is starting to show that there is generally a.

 If I can describe it as greater persistence, greater, greater distress, which is causing complainants to persist for longer. And then I would say probably the third possible reason, reason, which is, of course another global reason, is, of course, the pressure of the cost of living on a lot of parents and families.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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I'll go to the second one first if I may. So again we find with DWP in different areas in pensions as well. And this is well on public record that the communications some. If you look hard at the DWP Service Charter, you will sometimes look at the communications and say, this isn't measuring up well. So in terms of how clear, but also that checking of how well it is understood, and I think I took the opportunity to look at their 26 customer experience survey. And you can probably see that echoed in the feedback on that.

 So we sometimes find that the communications are too boilerplate to macro. We certainly find that the the regular updates to the customer of what is happening with my case. Why is this the case? So, you know, giving it a very grand word, also procedural justice. Why have you made this calculation this way? What caused you to do this? So there is there's certainly work to be done there. And again, if I go back to the program, they reflect on that and say, you know, we will get better at that in the first one. Keeping customers up to date up to speed.

 That too. And we are also not blameless in that respect, and we're working hard on it. None of us do well enough. Both they and we are creating an online account, which does help a bit because you have a dedicated space where you can, you'll get more of an update of how your case is progressing and why. So there is certainly more work to be done there. And there is just there's just one thing which I think we've picked up anecdotally, and that is some of the communications assume that a paying parent intends to be delinquent from from the off, and that they are sometimes rather harsh from the start, they assume, whereas and I'm sure the department knows this, you know, many parents paying parents actually want to be doing the right thing by their children.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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So if I can go to that last question first, we'd welcome the committee's support in encouraging CMS. It's not that they've said, no, they're not going to share the service modernisation programme, but we would find it helpful if we could get closer to the programme. Its aims to be able to follow through on its delivery. We have heard anecdotally that the the portal is not working perfectly, which I think is what you are referring to. And, you know, that's not infrequently the case. You know, this is government i.t it's not going to be flawless, shall we say, as I'm sure the committee has heard before, but we would happily come back or submit something to the committee once we've got a better understanding of what is the programme, what's the process?

 How can you keep us up to speed with how it's going and how it's addressing things? Committee will be aware that we're working much more closely with pension side of the department on the action plan. I'm not suggesting, nor do we have the resource that we work as we are working closely with them on the action plan. But I think something in between, so we can see what they are trying to do, which will help give an assessment of, you know, also on our individual redress, but also how we can support the committee for you to oversee the success of their service.

 And this is particularly key if the move to collect and pay kicks in at some point, because that's going to be a major programme for them, a major disruption.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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I mean, it's difficult. We with this particular part of DWP, we you know, we work at the operational level. And it's always important to say that there are a lot of great frontline workers in both of our jurisdictions working hard. So we don't in this area, we don't engage with any senior levels. So it's difficult for me to say whether institutionally they grasp this and they're putting the resource into it. I would go back to what I say, which is a focus on the life of your complainant, anecdotally, and not somebody from the department said about 15 years ago, when they were designing the it they thought that the max number of change of circumstances that anybody would have would be for now, that's probably not borne out in practice.

 So if systems and regulation are designed around, you know, a set of lives that don't exist, it makes it extremely hard. The only thing that we have seen in our health jurisdiction happening is where your IT or the regulations means it's very complex and you can't really speed it up. Is this concept of waiting well, which where in health they have backlogs in ADHD assessments, the waiting well is they ensure that they have a way of making contact with, you know, parents or patients, but also helping them cope as they go through and possibly through some of their trauma informed work.

 That waiting well concept, some of this can't be avoided, some of this can't be avoided. But you can certainly make it a better experience in that year that you say, which is very painful and very painful, probably for both parents. Thank you.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Thank you.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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I'm very happy to do that. And I might ask Simon to say a word about I think if if two sets of officials disagree on stats, I think I may let them fight it out, if you don't mind. But I think there's a couple of things that's worth saying about complaints. The volume of the CMS caseload has risen really quite significantly. So since 20 1920 1920, the number of cases has gone up by about 64%. So while the number of complaints is going up relative to the caseload, that isn't the case. The complaints that we see overall.

 And so having said that, I'm not being complacent about that. I mean, we take all complaints very seriously. And CMS does regard complaints as a source of intelligence and feedback to make sure we can learn about what happens and and how we can make things better. But I think just two things that are worth noting . Complaints about the CMS. Of course, the CMS, unlike most government services, has two customers. And so even if one customer is very satisfied as a result of an action by CMS, it's entirely possible that that will leave the other other customers unhappy with what's there.

 However, the second thing I would say is the point you're making about treating customers with respect. I take extremely seriously, and I'm grateful to you for putting it in that context. Simon, without delaying, 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? Yeah.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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So sorry.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Thank you, chair, and an excellent place to start. I think the first thing I would say is customers perception of fairness and how and trust in the CMS is going to be driven by their experience of using it. So the job of the organisation is to make sure that the experience is one which can inspire a sense of confidence, of fairness and of understanding and responsiveness. So it's not just an administrative service now. It is a challenging environment, as you know only too well. Inevitably, by the time often trust has broken down between the two parents before they ever get to use the CMS.

 So, so it's important the CMS does follow the rules consistently, because the two customers will have different expectations and different and different desires from the process, but also to do it in a way which feels appropriate and responsive. So one of the things that we've been setting out to do is to look at how do you make it really clear what's going on at every stage. So how do we make be clear as to so if you come to the service, if you're paying parent, how do you know that all the information you've 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're a parent and you're expecting money, when should you expect it? What do you do if it doesn't turn up? Who do you tell? How do we do that? And so a lot of work has gone into communication, into both the content and the the expression, the formatting of information for customers, but also trying to drive some reform about making sure that we do get better performance in terms of compliance, which I'm sure we'll come on to is better than it ever has been in a difficult environment.

 But but the most important thing is it's not just about that. Our job is to get money to children. In the end, the CMS is about making sure children get the maintenance they're entitled to. So our job is to get money to children, but to need to do it in a way that both parents understand and feel heard and seen in that process while applying the law consistently. And that's what we're setting out to do. And that's been the purpose of the reforms.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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I think it's going to always going to be challenging for partly the reason I said there are two customers. And so it's quite possible. I've seen cases where the CMS did all the right things. I've listened to calls, so I do listen to them and not as many as Simon who can tell you. Simon listens to a vast numbers of calls. So I've come to the conclusion that our job is to try to make the system as fair as it can be, while recognising this is a 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 having to is getting less. And so there's no way we can. We have to apply the law fairly. But the key to this 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 the quality assurance to customer service, to consistent training, to, to 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 is, which should be, which should be taken without expectation, but also that parents can understand that and that they can be appropriately sympathetic or empathetic to the circumstances while not trying to say to because you can't tell both parents they're right if they want different things.

 The final bit, I think the real source of trust is that CMS gets things wrong. And when I've seen cases where it gets things wrong, if you have 820,000 cases a year, it's going to get things wrong. The most important thing is when it does that, it puts its hands up. It says it's got it wrong, it works out why it's got it wrong, it puts it right, and then it works out how it's going to make sure the systems improve for next time. And one of the things I have been really impressed is it is a learning organization.

I mean, I knew some of this world from the outside. It's only when you become a minister that you get to be a bit closer up and to peer into the into the darker corners. And they are a very learning organisation. I find that they do. They will absolutely say, we messed this up. This is what we've learned from it. This is how the procedures are going on. And we've been working very hard together in continuous improvement to try to get constantly better, because I think that's the way to improve trust from customers.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Thank you. That is a great question. We have come to the conclusion that this is absolutely the right thing to do at the moment, with direct pay, one of many of the challenges we see and some of the complaints that you, as MPs will see, are the indirect pay CMS simply works out, gets the information, works out what has to happen, and parent one pays parent two. The problem is if they don't pay. And we found out from research quite how often they don't pay other than what they should at one time. We don't know unless one or other parent tells us.

 So it can go quite some time. But then they come into the to the, to the, to the direct to collect and pay service. But which time arrears are built up. Things have gone badly wrong. So in the transition, what we're going to do is that firstly, we will make sure that customers get plenty of notice. The applicant, the person who applied to the CMS will be. The. One will go to first. They will get given three months notice, will give really clear communications will help them to work out what do they want to do?

 What are the circumstances between their parents such that they could actually make an arrangement on their own, what we call a family based arrangement, because direct pay will have lots of parents who actually can get on perfectly well and do it. So we could help them work out what's 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, then they need to come into the service. And so we're looking now really carefully at how do we transition them. We're working through different ways of doing that.

 I mean, about what, you know, how do we move cases over together? Do we consider Pathfinders? We're working through all of that. But the key to this is going to be doing 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, the effects on customers and the effects, particularly on any vulnerable parents.

So we are really taking that very seriously.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Very, very carefully.
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None Portrait Speaker 3
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Yeah. Of course. So our approach to enforcement is a, is a escalated approach. In the vast majority of cases, we generally don't need to use our enforcement powers in order to be able to, for paying parents to make their payments. However, there are some instances when we do have to deploy them. We have powers, as the minister referred to there, to be able to deduct from earnings, etc., and also to be able to take money directly out of bank accounts, and then we move into our more legal, our legal power route by issuing a liability order, which obviously we need to go to the courts for now.

 That's one place where we are really making improvements in improving the time that it takes to get there, and then hopefully be able to prompt more voluntary compliance. We have . We. We are planning to complete our legislation for admin liability orders, for example, in March and April of next year. And then we'll be able to sort of really get them out as part of the process over the summer. So we do have plans in place to do that. But in the meantime, I've only recently joined CMS, and of course, this was one of the first things I asked is, you know, how can we really improve this process to get there quicker?

 We have negotiated with HMRC's additional court slots, and we are already starting to see the real benefit from that in actually being able to speed up the process of getting those liability orders into court. So that's one of the initial things that that that we have done all already. And hopefully our customers will, will start to see the benefits of that. There are other things that we are doing around the use of predictive analytics. For example, our early enforcement, our early intervention team was launched last year in 2025, and we use predictive analytics there to look for patterns in customers, behaviours that imply that somebody might be about to go non-compliant.

 And then our that team then can reach out to those customers and say, what can we do to help you so far, proven, really quite successful.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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That's really helpful. I mean, we work on the assumption that most most parents want to do the right thing by their kids. And so our job is to make it as easy as possible to do the right thing. And then but if they really, for the small minority that really don't want to, then, then of course, the CMS job is to step in and say, I'm sorry, however difficult things are, you do have to pay for your children, but most most paying parents want to do that. And the predictive analytics is a good example. Sometimes it's something changing in someone's life that can disrupt the payment.

 Maybe you change jobs, something happens and that can disrupt it. And if you can step in before things go wrong, then it's much easier to stop it going down, going, going down. But the final bit, just to show, I would want you to know and. Mr.. Was that the CMS in the year to June 2026, CMS collected £235 million via enforcement. So it's not that it's not working. I mean, 1.7 billion overall in the year, but just by enforcement that did collect 275 million to 235 million via enforcement in that year. So there's an awful lot of money is being collected.

 So it's about we're looking at ratcheting up improvements each stage by stage. And I've come to the view that there are some big things we have to change, like collect and pay, because there's only so far we'll ever be able to go. If we can't see as indirect, you can't see what's going on, which means it all goes badly wrong before you can pick it up. But after that, it's my it's a little bit like British cycling, you know, there isn't you don't just need a better bike, you need an accretion of small gains. You need to make all the things better.

You need to make the operations better, the communications better. You need to make the case work better. You need to make it easy all the stages. And that, in the end, is what will transform the experience of customers and money getting to kids. Thank you.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Yeah. No, it's really I think the big one has been has been Simon saying going through all of the letters. I mean, I know it sounds I mean, why would you need 500 letters? But it's just because there are so many different within those 820,000 customers and cases and twice as many customers almost. There's lots of different circumstances. So going through all of those letters, making sure that you retire it where you don't need them, and then the other rest of them are clear is key. But for me, this is probably the single biggest change is going to be about communicating the things that matter most to the customer.

And what they most want to know is how much do I owe? How much am I owed? Why? Where did it come from and how do I pay it? And so a lot of work has gone into, I touched on this earlier to developing a system within. So for example, we now have my child maintenance case. I mean, 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. Now, in some ways I'm not surprised because for DWP , this demographic skews young because they've got kids.

 I mean, you know, so they're probably more used to using online things in other parts of their lives. So a lot of a lot of people will only be communicating with CMS via the online service. So what's really important is when you log on to my child maintenance case, you need to see what's there and find out, okay, what's happened . Now, sometimes in the really complicated cases that you will see in casework, one of the reasons it's complicated, these cases could go back 15 years. And during that 15 years, they may somebody may have changed jobs repeatedly.

 Children may new children may have been born, parents may have separated. They may have repartnered with somebody else. Each time one of those things happens, then the whole assessment has to be redone. If it's relevant, both parents written out to the amount of money changes and you start again if their arrears, that builds up. So what we need is that parents, when they log on, can see really clearly, okay, this is how much I owe. It's because of that's because of shared care. That's because of my job. Okay. It changed. Okay. That's because this happened at that point and that happened.

And so if we can make it clearer for them, then I think that will help the perceptions of fairness and their understanding of the system. And also it will equally it makes it easier for our caseworkers because they too, if someone phones up, you know, you have to go all the way back through. If they can see really clear, they can explain it to customers on the phone. So that's one of the key ones. But the other bit is about is about the thing that the chair touched on, which was about making sure our caseworkers, all of our staff are engaging with respect and understanding with customers, because it isn't just in the end a sum.

These are your kids. It's your life. You know, the point at which you come to us. The whole thing is just falling apart, you know, and this is this is terrible. And so we need to have empathy and understanding for that. And I talked to loads of CMS staff and they are really good people. They really get this. So our job is to support them and make sure it's consistent and they can explain things well, but with appropriate levels of empathy and then support customers.

 Sorry, I could go on and we stop stop me.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Helpful if you have .
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Liz Twist Portrait Liz Twist
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And what used to be called contact order. Indeed, again, a really great question. One of the things we spend quite a bit of time doing is I spend quite time doing is having to explain not not to you, but to other audiences, the distinct roles of the CMS and the family courts. And they do have quite distinct roles and operate, as you know, under quite distinct legislative frameworks. And so CMS, on the one hand, is, is a rules based statutory service designed to calculate across a large case, whereas the family courts inevitably are more focused on individual cases.

 And that what however we do. So it's not that the two have no connection at all. And we are working quite closely with the Ministry of Justice. So, for example, the MoJ is. developing some digital tools for supporting parents in kind of. post-separation conflict and really engaging with them, looking at how the work we do in supporting parents to make to make arrangements, can can dovetail with them and can align well. So I've met with them. I've met with my counterpart. Imagine I'm meeting meeting again shortly. My counterpart, Minister MJ, shortly on the family justice side, to discuss how we can make sure what we do doesn't, doesn't fight and aligns well while recognising that they have distinct roles and CMS.

Of course, it's not that there's no connection. So if people go to the family courts and they come, for example, with a court order, then 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. But in the end, it will have to make it along the way. Parliament has prescribed it. It will have to make it along the lines of of the law around child maintenance. But but we are, we are. It's just just to reassure you that we do talk to our MoJ.

And we do. recognise that we overlap to some degree in the same space, but it's really important that we make clear we're doing different things. So for example, on.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Was to help us. redesign the training that we do for our colleagues. And so we got some really rich feedback from them sessions. And essentially we've just relaunched that training. So that training, for example. incorporates trauma informed training. So again, the information we got from them stakeholders was really, really key. So we launched that training that goes live as of this month. And what we want to do there in terms of making sure everyone in the organisation gets captured with the new training, is they will get put through an enhanced. module specific to that so that there's not that gap.

 The other thing that's just kind of recent thing that's been launched is we we have a safeguarding gateway. So that was launched just on Monday of this week. And again, it's something that I've been on myself. So it's a really easy resource. So if you're a colleague, it basically gives you a kind of what do you need to do in certain circumstances? So again, you know, the resources that we give to colleagues is really important. So the training we give to, to colleagues is key. And as the minister said, domestic abuse training happens every two years with a.

 refresher in the intervening years. So that's that's really, really important, including a knowledge checker. We've now got this enhanced training, which is as a consequence of the feedback we had from the 17 specialist organisations. The other thing, which I think is really important here as well, chair, is that I mentioned before about the quality assurance framework. So the quality assurance framework, the standards are embedded in there in terms of what we look out for in relation to, you know, what we need it to do around safeguarding and domestic abuse. So if you think we're, you know, we've year to date and listened to over 60,000 calls, that's a lot of information in there where it means we can make sure that our colleagues are doing what we need them to do.

 So lots of really good stuff in this space that I think we're .
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Really helpful.
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Liz Twist Portrait Liz Twist
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On that and why the department is sticking by its position on this? Yeah, of course, there's a couple of things embedded in that. Firstly, let me deal with the gross income point because this comes up quite often. There are there are two ways to do this. You can 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's often not understood. I mean, the previous system had used net income, and then you'd set the rates to take account of the fact that obviously it's net income.

 The big problem with it, if you go for net income, is that the previous. administrations found that it just caused lots of instability and uncertainty, and movement around rates was gross. Gross taxable income is a really clear and. unambiguous basis on which to make a judgment on affordability. One of the benefits of the system is that the the key, the biggest driver for most paying parents is simply you pay a percentage of your income. And so obviously if your income goes down, so too does the percentage. And if your income goes up, so too does the percentage.

 And the reason behind that is that the whole point of CMS, CMS is there to get money to kids, or crucially, it's there to make sure that the children continue to benefit from the income of both parents, even if the parents have chosen to live apart. And so obviously, if you were still both living with your child and your income went up, the child would benefit from the income of both parents. Again, if you were living together, the income went down. The child would have to bear the consequences of, of, of that payments going down, their income, household income going down.

 So broadly speaking, it does track that. Well, I think it has been. But what happens? You make an assessment once a year and then it's reviewed after a year. And in that year the the assessment will only change if the paying parent's income has moved up or down by more than 25%. Now, I felt when we reviewed the calculation that that was too much, that you could your income could rise or fall by.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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In terms of .
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Department .
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None Portrait Speaker 3
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That do you .
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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A .
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None Portrait Speaker 3
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Or a.
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Liz Twist Portrait Liz Twist
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Calculation is actually leading to or can be weaponized? I think the, the aim, the element of the shared care part of the calculation is that it, it, we need to find some way, some, some reasonably consistent way of reflecting the fact the circumstances when care is shared. Now, it's not the majority. I think about. Only about a quarter of parents using the service do have shared care. But in those cases we need to find some way of reflecting on it. Now it's it's in the end, the CMS can't make a judgement based on on whether the motivations of parents.

It can't 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. And I think we have to trust that the majority of parents want the best for their children. And so the system, the system could not take account of that, because that would be unfair, because it would then leave parents who were, say, taking the child for 2 or 3 nights a week, having to bear some of the costs, and yet still also having to pay the other parent to do it.

 And so that so the system it's not it's it feels like of all the ways of know we've done, we looked at different countries around the world and we didn't think any system had found the perfect way to do this. And so in as much as one has to find a proxy for shared care, this felt, this feels like the nearest proxy that we found. And so that's why we're applying it. But we are applying it sensitively. But the bigger question about whether or not, I mean, it's up to the courts, as I was discussing earlier with, with, with Liz to decide what care how contact should be arranged or how care should be.

 distributed all the way. Parliament sets CMS up. It gave it the job of reflecting what was actually done, not what should happen. So, and it has to stay in its lane in that it can't we couldn't 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 a child. If there is.

 If it comes to the conclusion that both overnight and day to day care are .
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