Katy said child support arrears built to almost £10,000 after the Child Maintenance Service failed to make her ex-partner pay. She told Panorama she went to food banks last year and had to cut back on her children’s activities.
She said her ex-partner was meant to pay more than £330 a month for their two children, but the money did not arrive. More than three years after the pair broke up, the unpaid balance had climbed to more than £9,000.
Katy and Panorama
Katy said, "Last year, I was really struggling," when describing the pressure of the arrears. She added, "I did go to food banks… there's been occasions where I've wanted the kids to be able to do more, more clubs, do stuff with their friends. I've had to say no, I feel terrible."
Her case is one of several in Panorama’s Child Maintenance: Parents under Pressure, where parents said the Child Maintenance Service left them dealing with non-payment and, in some cases, administrative mistakes. A father told the programme that years of disagreement over an account where an extra child had been added left him anxious and stressed.
The Child Maintenance Service
The Department for Work and Pensions said the Child Maintenance Service successfully arranges vital payments in the vast majority of cases. It also said it takes very seriously the small number of cases where things go wrong.
That puts the service at the centre of a dispute that matters to separated families across Scotland and Wales, where child maintenance is used when parents cannot agree payments themselves. The mechanism is straightforward: if the two sides cannot settle the arrangement, the service steps in to help secure money for children’s living costs.
Department for Work and Pensions
For parents already owed money, the immediate issue is not the rule but the gap between an agreed monthly amount and what reaches the household. Katy said that gap has left her making choices about food and her children’s activities while the arrears kept rising.
The open question now is how many parents are affected in the same way by payment failures and administrative mistakes, and how often arrears are allowed to build before support is enforced.
