Children: Maintenance

(asked on 16th January 2015) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to paragraph 5.3 of the Government response to the 17th Report of the Public Accounts Committee, Cm 8988, what steps his Department is taking to alert Segment 1 (nil assessed) Child Support Agency clients to the fact that an estimated third of them would qualify for more child maintenance if they applied to the new statutory child maintenance scheme.


Answered by
 Portrait
Steve Webb
This question was answered on 21st January 2015

The approach to communicating with clients as they go through the case closure process is to encourage them to make a new child maintenance arrangement. Our view is that in most cases it is best for clients if they can make their own arrangements outside the statutory scheme. To support this, we contact affected clients three times; twice before and once at the point their CSA arrangement ends. All of these letters encourage clients to seek support from Child Maintenance Options and discuss the right arrangement for them.

We did not customise communications for nil assessed clients because we are unable to identify which clients would have a positive assessment until they apply.

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