Children: Maintenance

(asked on 2nd September 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps her Department is taking to identify whether parents with claims for historical Child Support Agency arrears (a) are still residing at their last known address and (b) have moved to a new address.


Answered by
Mims Davies Portrait
Mims Davies
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 6th September 2019

Legally, it is the responsibility of the customer to inform us if their address changes and as part of preparing a case we are ensuring that any outstanding change of addresses are processed. If a customer has not informed us of a change but have informed another part of DWP or HMRC then their address should have been updated on the Customer Information Service (CIS), and then we will automatically be informed and the clients record updated accordingly.

CSA will write to both parents at the most recent address we hold for them. If this is unsuccessful, we will attempt to trace them using the trace tools available to us. Trace activity would include using any information provided by the receiving parent on the representation letter in order to find the paying parents current location.

If, at the point of issuing a representation letter to the customer, we hold a Dead Letter Office (DLO) or No Fixed Abode (NFA) address for the customer the system suspends the representation and flags to the case worker to conduct a trace action.

If during representation a letter is returned DLO or NFA then the caseworker is instructed by procedures to suspend the representation and complete trace action.

If trace action is successful then the address will be updated the representation period restarted. Only if trace action is unsuccessful would we then continue to write off CSA debts.

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