Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps he has taken to close loopholes in securing child maintenance payments from non-resident parents since 2010.

The new statutory child maintenance scheme introduced in 2012 primarily uses a link to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to get information on taxable earnings of non-resident parents. This enables more accurate maintenance calculations and removes the ability of many paying parents to manipulate the income information they provide. Under the 2003 Scheme we have also expanded income assessable for maintenance to include ‘foreign earnings’ declarable to HMRC for UK tax purposes.

To secure collection, we continue to apply targeted enforcement measures proportionate to the difficulties and severity of any instance(s) of non-compliance. To reinforce this, since 2010, we have introduced the ability to deduct maintenance directly from someone’s bank account.