Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what powers the Child Maintenance Group has to recover funds from a parent reluctant to support their child or children; and how many times each power has been used in each of the last three years.

The Child Maintenance Service has a range of collection and enforcement powers, including deducting directly from a non-resident parent’s earnings; lump sum and regular deductions from a range of bank accounts; deductions from benefits; sharing non-compliant parents’ information with credit reference agencies; instructing enforcement agents to take control of goods; placing a charging order on property owned by a non-compliant parent and if necessary forcing the sale of the property; applying to the magistrates court to disqualify a non-compliant parent from holding or obtaining a driving licence or British passport, or to commit them to prison.

The latest statistics on the actions taken by the Child Maintenance Service to recover funds from non-compliant parents are published in Table 11 (“Enforcement Actions”) of the Child Maintenance Service Statistics. This includes data from June 2015.

This highlights different enforcement actions taken by the Child Maintenance Service, including the number of times each type of action has been initiated each quarter. It is available online at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-on-the-2012-statutory-child-maintenance-scheme.

The latest publication contains figures complete to the end of September 2018. Child Maintenance Service statistics up to the quarter ending December 2018 will be published in March 2019.

Please note we do not publish a full detailed breakdown of all the possible types of enforcement actions used, and we do not have such information readily available. Also note that figures are rounded to the nearest 100.