Men don’t pay and won’t pay. Governments for more than 30 years have failed abysmally to make fathers pay for their children. The latest report, following a long line of them, shows how few fathers are paying maintenance, and how many separated mothers are giving up in despair. Child poverty has risen to 44% in single-parent households, but when children do receive maintenance it cuts the child poverty rate by 25%. Why does the state fail to collect on children’s behalf?
The long and sorry saga of the Child Support Agency began in 1993. It was disastrously mismanaged from the start, arousing maximum rage with rebellious fathers’ protests for minimum actual collection of cash. When it was shut down, billions in arrears owed to mothers and children were simply wiped clean, never collected. The Child Maintenance Service (CMS) that replaced it has done no better. This week’s report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Gingerbread, the single parents’ charity, finds 41% of parents caring for children (almost all women) have no maintenance agreement at all from non-resident parents (almost all fathers). They have been failed by the CMS.
Parliament passes ever more legislation and regulation designed to make fathers pay, but this has been gesture politics, performative indignation that shows how little effect any law has without effective enforcement. I wrote about this two years ago, and in that time things have only got worse. The CMS has magnificently draconian powers on paper. If a father fails to pay the sum assessed, the CMS can take payments directly from his salary or his bank account. It can remove his passport and his driving licence until he pays up. It can even imprison him. If you didn’t know that, it’s because those powers are virtually never used: the CMS has removed just three passports and one driving licence since 2019. Boris Johnson’s government ran a consultation proposing a tag and a curfew to make recalcitrant fathers “remain at a specified place at specified times” for up to six months, but they dropped it, saying they would “keep it under review”.
What the CMS has never had is the administrative capacity to impose those laws. Between 2019 and 2024 it suffered cuts from 5,958 staff to 3,779, despite rising number of mothers applying. It’s not the fault of the beleaguered civil servants in an understaffed service. No surprise there’s a high staff turnover: it must be the job from hell coping with distraught mothers, while trying to get honest earnings information from furious fathers.
I talked to one mother of three children who has been failing to get what she is owed by her ex-husband for so long that she advises others on dealing with the CMS. After being abused by him for years – three wrist-breaks, two skull fractures and a rape ascertained in the family courts – she finally left when he hit their children. Sometimes he pays, sometimes not, and arrears over the years have amounted to about £11,000. Her home was repossessed this month for non-payment of her mortgage, after Liz Truss’s budget sent it soaring. As so many find, retelling their story over and again to a new person on the phone (often with two-hour waits, says the report), inexperienced CMS staff are “too easily convinced by fathers”. This woman’s ex did what many do, on getting a CMS demand: “He got his employer to make him self-employed, and had the money paid to his girlfriend’s account, and said he had nothing.” When a bailiff went round he took out a knife and threatened suicide so he was written off as “too vulnerable”. She says he’s a high earner and he and his partner flaunt their wealth online, taking holidays she and her children could never afford. She says they post poisonous stories about her on social media. Last Christmas she and her children relied on food banks.
Imagine working at the CMS in the midst of all that, with a short time for each call, not on a high pay grade. With no dedicated caseworkers, every call means starting again from the beginning. It would take very skilled and sensitive staff to deal with the high proportion of domestic violence cases: they get just three hours’ domestic abuse training. Good fathers who do pay find the service as difficult, both sides believing the CMS biased against them, both believing it makes friction worse.
Some non-payers are put on a collect and pay system, where the CMS collects the money on the mother’s behalf. But if he still doesn’t pay, it’s the mother who gets nothing. Why doesn’t the state pursue him? Because it’s not the state that forfeits the payment. The state is exceedingly – sometimes excessively – good at chasing after fines and debts. Look how the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) pursued vulnerable carers after they were mistakenly overpaid a carer’s allowance, seeking mammoth amounts that carers never knew they owed, until Patrick Butler’s Guardian investigation hounded them into relenting. How about prosecuting someone for £1.90 for a possibly wrong train ticket?
Since the DWP is so good at chasing after small benefits infractions, it’s time it took on the duty to collect from non-paying fathers. Once the CMS has awarded maintenance, if the father fails to pay up, the DWP should pay the mother the missing money. If it were the state, not the mother and children, out of pocket, the chances are the DWP would pursue the father with far more vigour, and children get the money they need. This government has already recommitted to Labour’s aim to abolish child poverty. Much of that will depend on better benefits and better childcare, with work and training support from jobcentres. But a good place to begin would be with those many children who deserve maintenance from their fathers. There has always been something bizarre about the state’s inability – or fundamental unwillingness – to level up the costs of children between mothers and fathers.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org
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