Gingerbread Report On Child Maintenance Service

EDM number 575 in 2016-17, proposed by Caroline Lucas on 19/10/2016.
Categorised under the topic of Child support.

That this House welcomes the report from the charity Gingerbread, entitled Missing maintenance; notes that when child maintenance goes unpaid by a parent, children lose out; deplores the disastrous record of the Child Support Agency in collecting unpaid child maintenance, which has resulted in almost £4 billion of outstanding arrears; believes that, with nearly half of paying parents in the new child maintenance system owing arrears, the new Child Maintenance Service is already underperforming on its collection of such arrears; and calls on the Government to use the income from collection fees to bring about a substantial improvement in enforcement action over the next three years, with clear annual debt collection targets for both Child Support Agency and Child Maintenance Service debts.

This motion has been signed by a total of 97 MPs.