Child Maintenance Service (CMS)

3. Mr A complains that CMS delayed:

• acting on his concerns that it had used the wrong income details to calculate his maintenance payments in May 2022 • recalculating his maintenance payments after he told it he had shared care in December 2022 • recalculating his maintenance payments after he had become unemployed in February 2023.

4. Mr A says that CMS’s failure to act sooner left him with very little money to live on for too long and put further pressure on his difficult financial circumstances. He also says its failure to respond to him in good time was very frustrating. CMS offered him a £150 payment which he says is not enough to put things right. Mr A wants CMS to pay him more money to put things right.

5. Mr A’s ex-partner applied to the CMS in February 2021 and it calculated that he should pay £52 per week based on his income. The case changed to Collect and Pay in August as CMS said Mr A was in arrears (owing money) with payments under Direct Pay. Collect and Pay is where CMS arranges the payments for the parents with a charge but there is no charge with Direct Pay.

6. In May 2022 CMS increased the payments to £95 per week backdated to November 2022. This was based on income details it had at the time. Mr A asked for a Mandatory Reconsideration (MR is how to challenge the amount of payment) of the calculation because the increase in his income was temporary because he worked overtime. In July CMS told Mr A it would not change its decision.

7. On 2 December Mr A told CMS he now had court ordered shared care of his children. He sent it a copy of the court order and CMS took no action at that time.

8. In February 2023 CMS calculated that Mr A should pay £60 per week based on his income at the time. Mr A told CMS he lost his job, he was claiming benefits and he questioned the calculation. CMS did an MR but did not change the decision as it said there was not enough evidence of the change.

9. A further calculation was done in April when CMS found out Mr A was getting Universal Credit (payment for a person on a low income). As the award assessment period also included some earnings from Mr A’s old job, CMS did the calculation on his last known income and this time it accepted the shared care and reduced the payment to £43 per week.

10. In June CMS did another maintenance calculation for an increase in the shared care and backdated this to February. This reduced the payments to £34 per week. Mr A questioned this calculation as he was still unemployed.

11. Mr A contacted his MP with his concerns about CMS’s calculations who contacted CMS on 17 July. CMS did a review of all the calculations.

12. After the review, CMS said it should not have increased Mr A’s payments in May 2022. and it should have looked at the shared care from December 2022. From February 2023 it said the payments should have been reduced to zero when he became unemployed. The changes reduced Mr A’s arrears greatly but £880 remained.

13. CMS spoke to Mr A and paid him £150 for its errors and he has not yet accepted this payment.

14. Mr A tried to make a complaint to the Independent Case Examiner (ICE). ICE said it could not accept Mr A’s complaint because it cannot look at child maintenance decisions. It said some of the issues Mr A raised had not been through the CMS complaint process.

Delay – recalculation of payments in May 2022 and February 2023

17. Before we decide if we should do a detailed investigation of a complaint, we look at whether there are signs the organisation has got something wrong. We do this by comparing what should have happened with what did happen. We have done this and have not seen that CMS delayed in acting on Mr A’s concerns.

18. CMS’s decision to increase Mr A’s payments in May 2022 and its decision not to reduce Mr A’s payments when he lost his job in February 2023 both had the right of appeal. Mr A partly did this by asking for an MR of the decisions.

19. Mr A said that DWP took too long to correct his payments as they were too high until July 2023 when CMS changed some of their decisions.

20. The DWP Customer Charter does not set out any timescale for dealing with MRs, but it does say, ‘you can trust us to be helpful’. Our Principles of Good Administration say, ‘public bodies should behave helpfully, dealing with people promptly, within reasonable timescales and within any published time limits’.

21. The CMS guidance says if a customer still disagrees with a decision after CMS has carried out an MR, they have a right of appeal to Tribunal.

22. Mr A told CMS he disagreed with the May 2022 and February 2023 decisions which prompted an MR in both cases. The first decision was completed on 30 May 2022 and the MR was completed on 25 July 2022. The second decision was completed on 10 February 2023 and the MR was completed soon after. Both requests for an MR were refused by CMS, so the next step for Mr A to challenge its decision would be to appeal the first tribunal stage.

23. In both cases, CMS looked at the decision again within two months of Mr A raising his concerns which is in a reasonable timeframe in line with our Principles.

24. This did not help Mr A as CMS did not change its decision. The next step would normally be to appeal. In this case, CMS decided it would look at both decisions again when his MP raised the case in July 2023. By then CMS seems to have had more information about Mr A’s employment ending than it did when it first looked at the February 2023 decision. This helped it change the second decision.

25. We recognise that Mr A did not get the reduced payments until July 2023, CMS did the MRs in a reasonable time. We do not know if appealing to Tribunal after he received the MR decisions would have got the reduced payment he wanted any sooner. We have no doubt he found the wait for his payments to be reduced very stressful, especially as it caused him financial difficulty. We have not seen any delay by CMS and we will not look at this further.

Shared care – December 2022

26. Before we decide if we should do a detailed investigation of a complaint, we also look at whether there are signs the event complained about had a negative effect which the organisation has not put right. Having done so we have decided CMS has already done enough to put right the impact of the delay in considering Mr A’s shared care.

27. On 2 December 2022, Mr A contacted CMS to say he now had court ordered shared care of his children. If a paying parent cares for their child overnight, this means the child maintenance payments can be reduced by an amount decided by how many nights this happens. Mr A says he phoned CMS to ask for his payments to be reduced but this was not done until his MP got involved in July 2023.

28. The first time CMS acted on the shared care was on 26 April 2023, when it recalculated his maintenance payments due to information it had received about his Universal Credit. It made a reduction and said he should pay £43 per week from 9 February. As it was still treating Mr A as employed, he still paid more than the revised calculation CMS made after his MP got involved. CMS had not backdated the change in shared care to December 2022 at this time which it only did after his MP raised concerns. It took eight months for CMS to properly consider the shared care. This was not a reasonable length of time and we do not think it was in line with our Principles.

29. Mr A wants more money than what he was offered. DWP guidance says that ‘consolatory payments usually range between £50 and £500, although lower or higher payments may be appropriate having considered the individual circumstances of a case’.

30. This was a difficult time for Mr A and we are sorry to learn about how his finances were affected and how this happened when he also had the expense of pursuing other matters through the family court.

31. At the time Mr A told CMS about the shared care in December 2022, he was paying £95 per week. After Mr A’s MP raised his concerns with CMS, he was told he should have been paying £52 per week because the wrong income was used. When shared care began, this amount should have been reduced by £7 per week, rising to £15 per week from January 2023 and reduced further from February 2023 (when his payment should have been zero because he was unemployed).

32. The main financial impact on Mr A was from the salary CMS used in its calculation, which caused his payments to almost double, rather than the delay in acting on the shared care order. CMS admitted it had not dealt with the shared care when it should have done. We do not doubt that this was frustrating for Mr A and we looked at whether CMS did enough to recognise that frustration. It apologised and it paid him £150 for how it had handled his case. This was in line with DWP guidance. We think CMS has done enough and we are not taking any further action.

1. We have carefully considered Mr A’s complaint about the Child Maintenance Service (CMS). We have not seen that CMS delayed his request to review his payments in May 2022 or February 2023. We think CMS has already done enough to put right the effect of the delay when the court ordered shared care in December 2022. We will take no further action on this complaint.

2. We are sorry to hear about Mr A’s financial struggles and how the delay in changing his maintenance payments affected him.