Child Support Agency (Hansard, 4 March 1999)

§ Angela Eagle

The administration of the Child Support Agency is a matter for the Chief Executive, Mrs. Faith Boardman. She will write to the hon. Member.

Letter from Faith Boardman to Mr. lain Duncan Smith, dated 3 March 1999: I am replying to your Parliamentary Questions to the Secretary of State for Social Security about the level of debt and backlog within the Child Support Agency. At 31 January 1999 the amount of child support full maintenance assessment debt was £507,794,866. This can be broken down further to £296,044,407 (58.3%) collectable debt, £197,532,203 (38.9%) possible uncollectable debt and £14,218,256 (2.8%) deferred debt. Deferred debt is where the Agency has deferred the debt indefinitely, provided non-resident parents meet certain conditions 886W on payment of regular maintenance and any remaining debt. Where appropriate the parent with care will be compensated for the loss of this money. To further increase the flow of maintenance and to help non-resident parents pay the arrears that they owe, wherever possible the Agency makes every effort to re-schedule debts; re-scheduled debts are those where the Agency has negotiated a closely monitored agreement with the non-resident parent to pay arrears by instalments. The amount of debt re-scheduled included in the £507,794,866 at 31 January 1999 was £395,578,470 (78%). I cannot provide precisely all the information that you have requested on the current backlog, but have provided as much as possible from the most recent information available. At 31 January 1999, there was a total of 278,518 maintenance applications outstanding. We normally refer to our maintenance assessment backlog as cases that are over 52 weeks old and have not yet been assessed. At any time, the Agency would expect to have a normal head of work of around 210,000 maintenance applications. The speed with which assessments can be cleared is constrained by the complexities of the current legislation which can require up to 104 separate pieces of information to be collected and verified before an assessment can be made, however the Agency is steadily reducing the time taken and is clearing the backlog of applications from the early years. Our original estimated volume of backlog cases outstanding in April 1997 was 225,000; by 31 January 1999 we had cleared 251,000, and in practice now expect to need to clear 300,000 cases. This is because as we have proceeded in clearing this work we identified more cases in the backlog than originally estimated. In June 1998 we introduced a major improvement of the Child Support Computer System (CSCS) which provided automated management information. To make full use of the automated information all of the existing cases on CSCS had to be checked to ensure their management information status was correct. This exercise involved validating 1.25 million cases, work was completed in December and means that we now have a reliable automated count of all work on hand. To clear these 300,000 cases by 31 March will require the Agency to clear around 50,000 cases in February and March. Although this is very challenging we cleared over 27,000 in January, and therefore expect to clear the 300,000 cases. We envisage that the extra resources which will be released as a result of clearing the maintenance assessment backlog will enable more resources to be concentrated on improving customer service and ensuring that parents meet their responsibility so that children receive the maintenance they are entitled to on a regular basis. I hope this is helpful.