Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of customer service provided by the child maintenance service.

The Child Maintenance Service (CMS) is committed to delivering our DWP Customer Charter promises and has created a customer-focused continuous improvement culture to support and achieve this. The customer charter emphasises the need to try to understand the customers circumstances and to treat fairly and with respect. Empathy is defined and expectations for its use, are made clear.

CMS Customer Experience Strategy involves bringing together all enabling colleagues and regularly reviewing lived customer experience using a dashboard of insight measures including the DWP customer experience survey and then turning this into actionable lessons learnt and improvement plans. Activity includes a programme of work to strengthen our performance management, quality assurance and 121 coaching.

We are also improving our communication with customers by expanding the facilities offered through our online self-service and web chat, allowing parents to access their account 24 hours a day, seven days a week at a time that works for them and simplifying the content of letters.

By improving our online services we’ll be able to use the most appropriate channel routing to get customers to the fastest course of action, increasing online usage and reducing the time spent on telephone calls.