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Written Question
Children: Maintenance
Tuesday 27th June 2017

Asked by: Yvonne Fovargue (Labour - Makerfield)

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, (a) how many and (b) what level of fines have been levied against husbands or partners who avoided paying child maintenance in each year since the introduction of the Child Support Act 1991; and what other sanctions have been imposed on people in that period.

Answered by Caroline Dinenage

The only fines that can be imposed relating to child maintenance are as a result of criminal prosecution for failure to provide information or providing false information for the purposes of calculating the child maintenance liability. These fines are imposed by a court, information about fines is not recorded by my Department for management information purposes, and could only be provided at disproportionate cost.

Within child maintenance enforcement, “sanctions” generally refers to powers used as a last resort, when other enforcement actions have not resulted in successful collection of arrears.

DWP publish information on enforcement actions.

Information on both civil and criminal enforcement actions undertaken by the Child Support Agency (CSA) is only available from April 2007. This can be found in Table 22 of the latest CSA Quarterly Summary of Statistics, available at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/child-support-agency-quarterly-summary-of-statistics-march-2017 . This includes information on a variety of enforcement actions, including commitment to prison and disqualification from driving (in the Committals section), along with information on the number of prosecutions that have been undertaken.

Information on civil and criminal enforcement action undertaken by the Child Maintenance Service is published on Table 16 of the Child Maintenance Service Experimental Statistics, which contains data between September 2015 and March 2017. The publication can be accessed online at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/2012-statutory-child-maintenance-scheme-aug-2013-to-mar-2017-experimental . These statistics do not include detail on the different types of enforcement action, so do not include the number of sanction actions taken.

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