Exposing The Child Maintenance Service/DWP

According to the Baroness Deborah Stedman-Scott and the Child Maintenance Service, they are lifting children out of poverty and giving them the best start in life.

“Children Come First” White Paper: 1990 - Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, said the Government would publish a White Paper proposing a child support agency. The resulting Child Support Act was passed in 1991.

The then-Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay, described the Child Support Act 1991 as a “natural adjunct” to the recently passed Children Act 1989, which emphasised court and family resolution. Whilst both gave “primary responsibility” to parents for securing the welfare of their children, the 1991 legislation emphasised the state’s role in ensuring separated parents financially supported their children.

The Child Support Agency (CSA) was launched on the 5th of April 1993 in a bid by the Conservative government to recoup the cost of paying benefits to nearly 900,000 single parents, most of them mothers, who receive little or no maintenance from their former partners.

The Child Support Agency (CSA) was created to implement the Child Support Act 1991 to ensure feckless parents took financial responsibility for their children. The agency was to take on the responsibility for the assessment, review, collection and enforcement of child maintenance payments and to reduce welfare costs

The powers given to the Child Support Agency were extreme "CSA snooping" was spoken of with the same distaste as the poll tax and portrayed as a modern-day equivalent of Big Brother.

Conservative MP David Tredinnick led demands for change saying: "If George Orwell were alive today and looking for a sequel to 1984, I suspect he would have based it on the CSA."

Unfortunately, the CSA did not go chasing the feckless instead went for the low-hanging fruit, those parents with private arrangements, parents on PAYE and serving members of our Armed Forces.

Many reports and articles in the media from the early days would suggest that the CSA are responsible for many suicides caused by their reckless, outrageous and extreme conduct, the CSA blamed it on the computer system, however, we now know this was not always the case as the CSA would inflate Interim Maintenance Assessments up to 300% to frighten parents to contact them.

Many Parents With Care (PWC) now called Receiving Parents (RP) were threatened with having their benefits stopped if they did not comply with the CSA and open a case against their ex-husbands/partners.

Civil Servants enforce the Child Support Act under the Department of Work and Pensions. Once vast sums of money were being passed from one Parent to another this is where I believe the temptation of Greed and Money started to exist.

We have seen big Corporations such as Serco being given multi Million Pound Contracts to the Value of 47 Million Pounds. TATA and G4 S have also been awarded huge contracts.

https://medium.com/understanding-spend/focus-on-serco-71c9d97f4db7

It would seem that Child Maintenance has become a big business with vast sums of money going through Bank Accounts. Below is the evidence of the wrongdoing of this Agency the CMS and these Corporations must be held to account for what I believe are Crimes Against Humanity and Routinely Violate Human Rights

The content below is transcripts of oral hearings and footage of the oral hearings spanning from 15th June 2011 to 18th January 2023, you will see the Director of Gingerbread Janet Allbeson giving evidence to the Public Accounts Committee on the 5th March 2012. Yet up until March 2020 Gingerbread has been stating that there was £3.8 billion of unpaid child support arrears, you will see in the transcripts and video footage that it was confirmed by Noel Shanahan that most of the £3.8 billion was not collectable. Gingerbread was reported to the Charities Commission for publishing dishonest and misleading information.

Official full hearing footage: https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/2e86a5dd-56b1-4022-a193-e4629d8e984c

£3.8 billion of unpaid child maintenance is unenforceable due to most of these arrears being created by Interim Maintenance Assessments inflated of up to 300%

As mentioned earlier Gingerbread attended these oral hearings yet they have still been stating in articles in the media that there is £4 billion of unpaid child support. https://inews.co.uk/opinion/child-maintenance-system-economic-abuse-410613 In this article by Marisa Bate on March 27, 2020 ‘My ex is using the child maintenance system to continue to abuse me’

Survivors say the CMS system is forcing them into poverty and allowing ex-partners to economically abuse them.

You will see that Gingerbread is still saying that £4 billion of child support arrears is unpaid - yet Gingerbread attended these oral hearings. It is clear that Gingerbread is knowingly misleading the public and whipping up a frenzy among single parents. The CSA/CMS have a very nasty habit of giving the receiving parents false expectations by informing them that the paying parent owes them thousands in arrears when in most cases this is not true. This obviously causes conflict between the receiving parent and the paying parent. This conflict often leads to parental alienation which is a form of abuse.

Here is a very interesting article written by Voice of the Child. The £3.8billion question….Child maintenance arrears

Another very interesting point to bring to your attention before moving on to the transcripts of the oral hearings. The Child Maintenance Service is supposed to be encouraging private arrangements yet Tom McCormack who was Director of the Child Maintenance Group and was moved on to the Marine Management Organisation in 2019 was instructing his staff to force people on to Collect and Pay.

Voice of the Child did have an article regarding this issue, but I believe the Child Maintenance Service had this article removed as it was embarrassing for them. Luckily the article is still available to see on the web archive website. CMS “Collect and Pay” targets and leadership performance meetings

The CSA/CMS have a habit of having content and webpages removed which is embarrassing for them.

Notice how the media is still stating that £3.8 billion is owed in arrears when it was confirmed that most of the arrears are unenforceable? Why is the media still publishing such inaccuracies? According to the BBC the Unpaid child maintenance backlog in UK is £3.8bn

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1874-i MONDAY 5 MARCH 2012 JANET ALLBESON, ROBERT DEVEREUX and NOEL SHANAHAN see Q31

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmpubacc/uc1874-i/uc187401.htm

Noel Shanahan: I think the £3.7 billion or £3.8 billion is really a legacy of the past. This is arrears going back over the last 19 years. About 50% of it is due to the Secretary of State, as well; it is not all due to parents. Through that time-10 or 15 years-a number of assessments were made incorrectly. There was a period of time when punitive maintenance agreements were put in place, frankly. If one parent disappeared and we tried to track them down but couldn’t get hold of them, we made an assessment of their income that was punitive to try to chase them down and frighten them into contacting us to put a proper maintenance agreement in place.

Official full hearing footage: https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/2e86a5dd-56b1-4022-a193-e4629d8e984c

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1047 -ii Wednesday 15 June 2011 Maria Miller MP, Dame Janet Paraskeva and Noel Shanahan See -Q150 in the transcript

https://web.archive.org/web/20121024145535/http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmworpen/uc1047-ii/uc104701.htm

Official full hearing footage: https://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/74df9d4f-fea4-433e-bc18-73658d6f7d54

Noel Shanahan: I think there are some severe question marks over the figure of 3.8. The work that the Department and CMEC have done identifies that, going back many years, we used to create something called an interim maintenance arrangement. Essentially it was a number that was brought up to say to the nonresident parent, "This is how much you will have to pay," and used as a bit of a lever when they would not give us their pay and information, which we have to ask for. So actually it was inflated, and it seems to be inflated by about 300%. When they did not pay, all those numbers have gone into the arrears. The truth is actually those arrears are somewhat inflated because of the tools that we used up to 18 years ago.

National Audit Office Report – Financial audit

Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission Client Funds Account 2011-12

Date: 5 Dec 2012

https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/child-maintenance-and-enforcement-commission-client-funds-account-2011-12/

https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/CMEC_2011-12_Client_Fund_Accounts.pdf

In the image below we have the screenshot of an email sent to Maria Miller on 5th February 2019 still no answer to this date,

Like the Director of Gingerbread Mrs Miller attended the oral hearing on 15th June 2011. Why did Mrs Miller take no action to address the fictitious arrears? The Government has been aware that the £3.8 billion was mostly fictitious so why did they not write off the fictitious debt there and then?

The CSA/CMS has still been attempting to collect the £3.8 billion by distributing it into Paying Parents accounts which has forced many Paying Parents to take their own lives.

As this money is not owed in child support where has it been going?

Please click on the image to enlarge

It is clear by this footage that Gingerbread has been misleading Marion Fellows, again the magical figure of £4 billion of arrears raises its ugly head. Why has Gingerbread still been stating that there is £4 billion of unpaid child support arrears? They know this is not to be true as you will have seen earlier Gingerbread attended the oral hearing with Noel Shanahan on 5th March 2012. This is serious dishonesty by Gingerbread. Here is the full footage of this debate https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/960b4667-0c5e-468c-a120-d7715b708f30#player-tabs

National Audit Office - Child Maintenance Client Funds Accounts 2016-17

The Department is closing the 1993 and 2003 Child Maintenance Schemes, supporting parents to set up family-based maintenance arrangements or apply to the 2012 Scheme. The C&AG has once again qualified his opinions on the 1993 and 2003 scheme Account. He has estimated irregular receipts and payments of £11.3 million, or 2.75% of total receipts. The C&AG also estimates that the arrears balance reported in the Account relating to unpaid maintenance is understated by at least £99.8 million (2.7% of the total arrears balance), largely due to errors in underlying assessment calculations that are compounded when the cases are managed outside of the IT systems. While the Department is trying to recover arrears accumulated under these Schemes, it is not carrying out retrospective corrections. This means it cannot ensure that the £3.7 billion it is trying to recover is an accurate figure. The Department is also unable to write this debt off, which means that unless action is taken, the 1993 and 2003 Scheme Account will report an outstanding arrears balance long after all the cases have closed. https://www.nao.org.uk/report/child-maintenance-client-funds-accounts/

In 2016 the National Audit Office received a high volume of complaints about the Child Maintenance Service issuing arrears to people without any evidence, this is actually common practice of the CSA/CMS. The report by the National Audit Office was released in March 2017 and it was damning.

You can see the report here

It is without a doubt the Child Support Agency and the Child Maintenance Service have been attempting to collect the £3.8 billion of unpaid child support arrears by adding thousands of pounds of arrears to Paying Parents accounts. This explains the high volume of complaints from paying parents about inaccurate arrears.

It is very clear that there is an issue with the CSA/CMS staff handing tens of thousands of pounds of arrears to Paying Parent's accounts, this is blatant fraud, false accounting and financial misconduct.

The Child Maintenance Service just like its predecessor has a habit of abusing its powers and like the CSA there is no proper redress for those who have been damaged by blatant fraud and misconduct. The complaints system currently in place is heavily biased and broken.

24th June 2021 Lord Farmer held a Child Maintenance Service debate in the House of Lords.You will hear him say that there has been Paying Parents who have attempted suicide and are feeling suicidal. You will see that all of the panel do not bat an eyelid over this comment. Stedman-Scott received an email from Brian Hudson on the 21st June a few short days prior to the debate. The content of the email was very concerning just like the email she received in December 2021 from Brian Hudson. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eS2NiDOMWc4FVYxjdjU0vAK28I_oQJw_/view

Here is the emails Brian Hudson sent to Sugden, Stedman-Scott, Coffey and Johnson in December 2020 https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1iniKpLnXP9meXuhNc6MsdiJwHGSeBliJ?usp=share_link

The email warned that the Child Maintenance Service was causing a lot of suicides these emails went ignored no response to date!

Watch Alex Reid's interview with Reform UK Parliamentary candidate Noel Willcox.

Noel talks about the findings of the National Audit Office regarding their audits on the Child Maintenance Service, everything Noel is saying has been backed up by the NAO.

Public Accounts Committee oral hearing 16th March 2022 The Child Maintenance Service deleted a large number of case files prior to the National Audit Office inspecting, I believe this action to be a breach of the Data Protection Act 2018 section 173 Alteration etc of personal data to prevent disclosure to data subject www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/section/173/enacted

Here we see Arlene Sugden gloating about digital bulk liability order hearings it would seem the right to a fair trial as per Article 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998 and the rule of law have been thrown out of the window! This is totally unconstitutional!

Ann Widdecombe has published an article regarding these unlawful bulk liability order hearings www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/ann-widdecombe/1731777/debt-collectors-child-maintenance-prepayment-meters

Lee Windsor (LW in Ann Widdecombe's article) discovered something very interesting 200 Paying Parents to appear in the same courtroom at the same time

2nd November 2022 Joshua Reddaway of the National Audit Office (NAO) in front of the Work and Pensions Select Committee confirms that the Child Maintenance Service has been collecting the Child Support Agency's fictitious debt.

Official full hearing footage: https://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/e1e7ecc2-36bb-40f6-a941-99d209171c73

Wednesday 18th January 2023 Work and Pensions Committee Subject: Children in poverty: Child Maintenance Service

Debbie Abrahams brought to the attention of the witnesses Viscount Younger of Leckie, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions; Arlene Sugden, Director, Child Maintenance Service, Department for Work and Pensions; Hilda Massey, Director, State Pensions, Child Maintenance and Devolution, Department for Work and Pensions there had been a suicide caused by their mismanagement of Paying Parent.

Official full hearing footage https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/9f37bc65-0f77-4934-acf9-33f208a92517

Sir Stephen Timms asked Arlene Sugden what comes out of their investigations when a client takes their own life, from my observations there is no transparency basically speaking as another MP says they are marking their own homework. The few seconds of silence before Arlene Sugden responds says it all.

Below we have screenshots from social media

Tony's comment was in response to Anne Widdecombe's article about forcing Ian Sandwell to suicide over fictitious arrears, the article can be seen here

Here is an article from 2008 which appeard in the Telegraph - Coroner slams CSA after fathers hanging death

Fictitious arrears! Victims of fictitious arrears have come forward to speak of their plight, the conduct of the CSA/CMS is criminal, to say the least. The CSA/CMS has been creating fictitious arrears and for those who have properties they will take your property for fictitious arrears, you will see this in the case of Tim Crawley. The first video is of Bambos Charalambos being evicted, the Child Support Agency had given him £64,000 of fictitious arrears. They ignored his complaints and ignored the fact that the property belonged to his brother they went ahead with this excessive enforcement. In this video, you will see Bambos's elderly mother pinned to the floor by the Police and you will hear her screaming. I find it most peculiar how the Police tell us when we approach them with evidence of fraud by the CSA/CMS that it is a civil matter, but they turn up to assist an illegal eviction? Going forward a year or so the CSA had to return the property to Bambos Charalambos's brother and in 2018 £58,000 of the fictitious arrears was written off. The remaining arrears is still in dispute, the harm and severe distress caused to Bambos and his mother was totally unnecessary. The Attorney General was shown this video but has ignored the correspondence, Ministers are fully aware of this fraud and corruption but turn a blind eye to it.