to think that Polly Toynbee makes a good suggestion in this article?

[Longtimelurkerfinallyposts]

I was struck by her latest article in the Guardian:www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/29/britain-child-poverty-fathers-pay

In it she suggests that the DWP should play more of a role in getting money from non-resident parents for child maintenance.
Is this a good idea, or is there a problem with it that I can't see?

Am I unreasonable to think that this might be an improvement on the current situation for many single parents?

Kemi Badenoch mentioned this.

It's an absolute disgrace that more hasn't been done about this.

Absolutely shocking that men can get away without paying child maintenance.

CMS need to use their powers

Fathers easily hid go 50% custody until the divorce is settled / hide their self employed earnings then obviously have cash, houses etc whilst women claim benefits as are unable to work full time.

It looks like many NRPs don't want to pay child maintenance. It's way past time this stopped seeming like a viable choice that's effectively facilitated by the failure of multiple mechanisms.

I agree with PT.
In the 80s my completely absent father (an accountant) sent about 10p a week and my brother's dad (a managing director) sent about 20p a week.
Fortunately my mum got a council house with her job so we always had a roof but we were skint.
I remember the celebrations when we got my dad up to £90 a month in about 1995.

it's not new - it's how local parishes managed it (extremely effectively) in the middle ages using the old poor law.

history history history history history history

I agree with this. “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.”

We need the American approach to this. Jail the feckless losers if they don’t pay for the kids they choose to have.

The CMS are a paper tiger, they seem to have power to make the NR parent pay but very little way of enforcing it. In the USA there are penalties, the courts will take your driving license or even jail you for non payment .

Yanbu. They need to get on this. Look at Brazil or some US states. Its deducted from pay or pursued (properly) through the courts. Hiding your earnings to avoid CM is fraud.

I think in Canada they can take the nonpayer's passport.

Maybe she mentioned it, but the article makes it clear that funding the CMS properly is an essential part of enforcing their powers. Or scrap it and hand to the DWP (but they'd still need to be funded, preferably so they can provide a caseworker model so someone can actually follow up) Funding public services really isn't Kemi's bag, is it?

Like PP said, the CMS are useless. Like most government agencies.

Our government and civil service is stuffed full of chocolate fireguards. Incompetent, morons you would pay to clean out your shed. Yet there’s hundreds of thousands of them ripping off the taxpayer.

It’s the same story everytime. A home office that can’t manage the borders. Ofwat that can’t regulate water companies. Ofcom that can’t regulate the post office. CMA that can’t get feckless dads to pay. These people are stealing a living from the taxpayer and giving nothing in return.

The mentality of these so called fathers astounds me! Imagine being happy not paying, going on holiday etc whilst knowing that you are depriving your own flesh and blood and condemning them to live in poverty. Feckless sperm donors.

They have never had more funding. Public services are funded, they are a bottomless pit because the moronic people is duped everytime by these useless civil servants saying they need more money.

More than half of all spending in this country is by the state. That is a disaster already. Spending more doesn’t get you more.

The DWP do a pretty bloody thorough job pursuing benefit fraud etc. The problem isn't service inefficiency (although that's always an easy gotcha) it's that there isn't the appetite across society for this particular service (the CMS) to crack down on 'child maintenance fraud' (my proposed term). More sunlight please- and it'd be great if media sources other than the guardian picked up on this ASAP.

We have a system a bit like that here, CMS isn’t a set percentage, its based on the costs of the child and the parents earnings, so each parent is essentially proportionally paying to raise their children. If it isn’t paid the state pays, but will then directly remove this amount from their wages, if they aren’t earning anything the state pays a set amount which is then accrued as debt, so when they do start earning the debt can be directly removed from wages.

The CMS do have decent powers, they just don’t use them, so I doubt a system change would make a great deal of difference, as again powers likelt wouldn’t be used.

assuming the idea that the DWP pays single parents what what the mainly father absent parent owes and tries to recover

This would take more money from government budget at a time of cut backs.

Also result in a strange situation where state pays more to a parent that may already be better off than another single parent.
eg single mother on universal credit with a disabled child get £x - if father has died or separated and has no money (everyone agrees) that’s what she gets

Single parent with a child getting a small amount of universal credit or none due to working or having savings. Does have quite a rich but useless and clever ex - gets more money from government than the other parent. However the DWP may never recover from the father and have paid for the maintenance and the costs trying to get money back.
Unfortunely vulnerable groups such as those earning just slightly too much on carers allowance are easy to spot and prosecute.
If it was easy we would have been doing it because they would have charged the fathers to cover CMS cost or even profit for the government.

Obviously it would be expensive for the DWP to pay in lieu of a defaulting parent, so I can't see that happening but one reason to do that is just to motivate a more "can do" attitude at the CMS, and surely that could be done anyway.

Hire the guys from the DWP or HMRC (don't actually do the latter, we need more people at HMRC) and just tell them to act as if it's a debt that these parents owe to them personally and throwing their hands up and saying "oh it's a bit too difficult let's not bother" is not an option. I've always said that the answer is to give them guns: not so that they use them, but because it would encourage the recruitment of people with the right attitude (yes it's a joke).

The other problem is hiding earnings. You can't always fix everything, there was a guy I heard about the other day who paid himself ten grand a year for NI reasons and paid his girlfriend eighty grand as "head of finance" despite the fact that she had a full time job elsewhere. That's difficult to get around. But you could take a much more joined up approach with HMRC.

I agree the DWP paying in lieu isn't realistic.

We need pressure to happen in other ways. The bar has been nonexistent for these men for too long- society as a whole needs to raise it.

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The assumed cost accrued as debt is a good idea. It would stop people hiding money in their company and suddenly taking it as dividends when their child hits eighteen.

They can do that here. They just don't.

Where's 'here'? Your first paragraph is interesting- it shows a system with teeth. I wonder whether the debt thing means they are more likely to stay unemployed for much longer though? To be honest it's the ones who can afford to pay but aren't that it'd be more useful to chase.

The CMS 'having powers but not using them' is the reason why system change of some kind IS needed, surely? But it needs to be driven by societal change and a real drive to reframe the issue as child maintenance fraud.