Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 27 May 2016 to Question 37474, how many full-time equivalent officials of his Department are responsible for any debt collection activity that the CMS system is undertaking to ensure that former Child Support Agency child maintenance arrears are received.

Where CSA arrears are moved across to the CMS system we will actively pursue collection where the CSA clients fall within three specific scenarios. These include firstly where a re-application has been made to CMS relating to the same case; secondly where the CSA arrears were being paid in the last 3 months prior to being moved over to the CMS system; and finally where a client actively requests we collect them.

Given this approach to the collection of these CSA arrears, they are collected through our business-as-usual processes within our Case Maintenance, Arrears and Enforcement Teams within CMS, where at June 2016 there were 3,256 full time equivalent staff.