Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of the current level of staffing of the Child Maintenance Service.

The number of people working within the Child Maintenance Service is reviewed regularly to ensure we have sufficient resources to answer customer calls and progress cases. Since 2020, we have recruited 790 people into the Child Maintenance Service on temporary contracts, this has been to backfill against resource lost to Universal Credit and other primary benefits. We have a very robust demand model and will continue to review the volumes of work against that model to ensure that we adjust staffing levels as required.