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 reduce waiting times for the Child Maintenance Service phone line.

The Child Maintenance Service are committed to delivering the best possible service to all customers within our growing caseload. We continuously monitor telephony performance and through this fully recognise that call waiting times are at times longer than we would like. To address this, we are working to improve the efficiency of our customer interactions through both the telephone and digital channels.

In September 2024, we introduced the Digital Assist Telephony Service, which has been a significant step forward in our mission to support and encourage customers to use our online services. In October, we restructured our call routing to make more caseworkers available to answer telephone calls. By promoting self-service options online and efficient call routing, we have freed up valuable resources to deliver a more responsive service and allow caseworkers more time to better assist customers who need to reach out to us via telephone. Additionally, we have extended the telephony service to 6pm on weekdays to meet demand and our online services are available to all customers 24/7. As a result, call volumes are reducing, and improved customer service being delivered through the combination of telephone and digital channels.

The Department publishes quarterly statistics for the Child Maintenance Service and the latest statistics are currently available to December 2024. Table 12 of the latest National tables shows the percentage of calls to the CMS that were answered each quarter, from January 2015 to December 2024.

Latest published quarterly telephony performance for the period Oct to December 2024 was 75% for Percentage of calls answered.

We will continue to review, evaluate, and enhance our telephony service to meet demand and deliver a quality customer service.