Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, on how many occasions the Child Maintenance Service has (a) taken criminal action against and (b) successfully prosecuted a parent who has knowingly provided false information to reduce their financial assessment in each of the last five years.

The primary goal of the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) is to ensure that children receive the financial support they are entitled to. To achieve this, the CMS collaborates with HMRC and Benefit systems to accurately calculate maintenance payments. This collaboration helps prevent paying parents from misrepresenting their income.

The Financial Investigations Unit (FIU), investigate complex income cases. This is a specialist team with extensive investigative powers to ensure that families receive child maintenance appropriately and in accordance with the paying parent’s whole income. They can request information from financial institutions such as banks, investment companies and mortgage companies to check the accuracy of information the CMS is given by either parent.

If necessary, criminal charges relating to information offences linked to the calculation, will be brought against those who persistently and deliberately evade their responsibility to provide financially for their children.

The Department publishes quarterly statistics for the Child Maintenance Service and the latest statistics are currently available to December 2024. Table 7 of the latest National tables provides information where the CMS applied to courts to sanction Paying Parents, from July 2019 to December 2024.

The specific information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.