§ Mr. Woodward:To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how many and what proportion of families are entitled to child support payments in (a)St. Helens, (b)Merseyside and (c)the North West region in the last year for which figures are available. [141299]
§ Mr. Pond:The information is in the table.
Number and proportion of families entitled to Child Support payments at 30 November 2002 Number of families (Thousand) Total number of Child Benefit families (Thousand) Proportion of families entitled to Child Support payments (%) St. Helens 4.6 22.1 20.9 Merseyside 32.9 173.6 18.9 North West 148.3 848.1 17.5 Notes:
1. CSA figures include all full maintenance assessment cases only and include direct pay cases and zero assessments.
2. CSA figures produced using IAD 5 per cent. scan of Child Support Computer System (CSCS) and therefore may be subject to sampling variation.
3. Figures are in thousands and rounded to the nearest hundred.
4. As a family can occasionally be part of more than one CSA case (when a parent with care has children by more than one non-resident parent) these figures represent a small over-estimate.
690W5. The proportion of families entitled to Child Support payments is derived by comparing the number of CSA cases with the number of families in receipt of Child Benefit.