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 to register details of a parent's debt on the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines as part of enforcement action for the collection of child maintenance in each year since 2015.

The Child Maintenance Service (CMS) continues to take rigorous action to collect maintenance, combining robust negotiation activity with the highly effective use of its extensive range of Enforcement Powers.

An application to the courts for a liability order once granted brings a range of legal actions we can take to collect the child maintenance:

• asking bailiffs to negotiate a payment, or to seize and sell a paying parent’s belongings
• registering a paying parent’s debt on the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines, making it difficult for them to get a mortgage, loan or credit card. This option is not regularly taken by the Child Maintenance Service and applied only to those in financial service positions.
• using an ‘order for sale’ to sell a paying parent’s property or assets, and taking the proceeds from the sale
• sending the paying parent to prison
• stopping the paying parent getting or keeping a driving licence

The DWP publishes quarterly statistics on enforcement actions for the Child Maintenance Service Statistics (experimental).

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 can be found in ‘Table 7.1: Enforcement Actions’ of the National tables.