Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, on how many occasions the Child Maintenance Service has successfully applied for a parent's bank or building society account to be frozen as part of enforcement action for the collection of child maintenance in each year since 2015.

The Child Maintenance Service may apply a Lump Deduction Order on a paying parent’s bank or building society as part of enforcement action. A Lump Deduction Order will freeze only the amount of maintenance due. If the account holds funds in excess of the maintenance owed, the proportion of funds not owed in child maintenance would not be frozen.

The Department publishes quarterly statistics on enforcement actions for the Child Maintenance Service. The latest statistics are available up to September 2022 and are available here.

The available statistics for enforcement actions used by the CMS from April 2015 to September 2022 in relation to Lump Sum Deduction can be found in ‘Table 7.1: Enforcement Actions’ of the National tables.