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In 1990 the Government produced a White Paper “Children Come First” which concluded that “the present system of maintenance is unnecessarily elongated, uncertain in its results, slow and ineffective”
The Government proposed that a Child Support agency (CSA) be created which would “Ensure that parents honour their legal and moral responsibility to maintain their own children whenever they can afford to do so… It is important that, as far as possible all the services relating to child maintenance which are to be provided to the public should be delivered by one single authority… It will be a priority for the Agency to secure payment to the parent with care as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The Child Support Act 1991 was passed – and remains (as amended the Child Support Act 1995 and by the Child Support, Pensions and Social Security Act 2000) as the statutory instrument responsible for the Agency.
By virtue of s8 of the Act only the CSA (not a court) has the right to make maintenance assessments for the children (except for some very limited circumstances). The parents and the child’s, right of access to the Court have been denied.
The CSA affects the lives of approximately 2 million parents and 1.5 million children.
The most recent CSA accounts (2003 – 2004) show that;
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£601 million was collected in maintenance payments |
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£500 million remains uncollected |
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£179 million was spent by the CSA to collect these payments |
In the forward to the annual accounts the Chief Executive of the CSA admits that the CSA makes errors.
In November 2004 the CSA Chief Executive – Doug Smith – resigned as a result of the ‘chronic failures’ of the CSA.
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Only 61,000 of the 478,000 parents who have applied for maintenance since the introduction of the new computer system in April 2003 have received any maintenance at all |
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£35 million is the total sum of maintenance payments missed between March 2003 and November 2004 |
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15-22 weeks is the average wait for the first payment |
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6 weeks is the Agencies target waiting week for the first payment |
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Only 43% of the expected money recovered was actually paid |
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Sir Archy Kirkwood – Chairman of the Works and Pensions Parliamentary Committee said “it is a systematic chronic failure of management right across the totality of the Agency”.
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Andrew Dismore, Labour MP said that the CSA had ‘woefully and dismally failed’ and that ‘the only thing you can rely on the CSA to do is to let you down’.
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| Saturday 6 September 2008 |
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This website gives general information relating to the Child Support Agency.
We invite you to subscribe to our ‘Part 2’.
Our Subscribers receive:
Practical advice about how to make progress with cases.
Information about ‘how to complain’.
How to claim a ‘Special Payment’ from the CSA.
and much, much more.
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© Fyefield 2004
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