In March last year, the CMS said it would apply for a liability order for Katy’s ex, but warned it would take 26 weeks to go to court. Katy was relieved and put a note on the calendar.
But as the date approached, the CMS told her it had still not obtained the order. In September, the CMS again told her it would apply for a liability order – worth about £6,000.
Katy said the service told her last month it was no longer confident of her ex-partner’s address it needed to send him the paperwork.
She is now in debt herself and her case is, in effect, on hold.
“I was really upset because it just came as such a shock. I thought that I was going to get somewhere and just haven’t,” she told us.
“I’m not sure I’m ever going to see the money.”
Katy’s ex-partner did not respond to our questions.
The CMS said it had apologised for delays in progressing the liability order and made a consolatory payment. It said the case has been affected by ongoing difficulty confirming and maintaining a reliable address for the paying parent.
Mother Susan told Panorama the CMS’s efforts to chase her ex partner for money owed had been “a waste of everybody’s time… a waste of everyone’s money”.
Her ex stopped paying child maintenance regularly five years ago, and is more than £10,000 in arrears. He was abusive, so we have changed her name to protect her identity.
The lack of financial support, she said, meant she had been forced to skip meals.
“No matter how many hours I was working, it wasn’t making up for the payments that should have been coming from the paying parent,” she said.
In Susan’s case, financial investigators at the CMS found her ex had the money to pay. The CMS took him to court but he failed to appear.
The CMS told Susan the court had issued a warrant but it could not take further action.
“They… told me they had no warrant officers,” she said, calling it an “embarrassment”.
The CMS said it had apologised for failings in this case. It said enforcement action could be complex and it must follow statutory processes.
The DWP told Panorama “continued modernisation” of the service meant it was “progressing cases more quickly and effectively”.
Director of the CMS, Simon Hunter, said a lot of the service’s 800,000 cases were “highly satisfied” with the service and compliance had improved in the past three years.
“We are working hard behind the scenes to try and make sure that we can facilitate regular child maintenance payments,” he said. “Where the case might be in an enforcement which is a very, very small percentage of our customer base, that journey can be quite an extensive period for customers to be in, and I can totally accept and appreciate that it can feel like it has taken a long time.”
