Child Maintenance Service should be re-designed to meet the needs of children and families – not the needs of the state

The UK’s Child Maintenance Service (CMS) was designed to promote family-based arrangements and reduce the ‘burden’ on the state to intervene.

However, there is a wealth of research and evidence highlighting the failures of an existing system that, in too many cases, fails to meet the needs of families.

Child maintenance is overlooked as a lever in the national mission to tackle child poverty. All too often we see broad, far-reaching societal measures to tackle poverty, with the hope that this will ‘trickle down’ to support key family groups. However, if we are to meet child poverty targets, we must invest in significant targeted interventions such as addressing the failing CMS.

At Fife Gingerbread, we have been working with the Poverty Alliance to revisit the challenges surrounding child maintenance and better understand how and if these have changed in the context of pandemic recovery and a cost-of-living crisis.

So far, we have learned that the system fails to consistently enable lone parents to access child maintenance – often causing harm, both financially and to families’ health and wellbeing. In cases where domestic abuse is a factor, the process is particularly challenging. Child maintenance, like poverty, is a deeply gendered issue as around 90 per cent of lone parents are women. Additionally, the research highlights a lack of awareness amongst practitioners supporting families and that child maintenance does not reliably feature in existing financial inclusion activity.

At a local level I am hopeful that the research will reinvigorate awareness and create a call to action, building capacity to take forward recommendations on improving the support available to help lone parents navigate the system. However, the key here is that the system itself is broken and requires radical change. Lone parent families shouldn’t have to navigate broken systems to secure financial support for the care of their child(ren).

The system does not work for families, and often fails both resident and non-resident parents. We must stop tinkering around the edges: we must advocate for transformational change. So, what could a supportive and successful child maintenance system look like? My belief is that the key principles that would underpin a successful system would include:

• A system that is free, transparent and simple to navigate, with caseworkers allocated to ensure families are supported and not retelling their ‘story’ repeatedly.

• A system with children at the heart of design and decision-making, that promotes children’s rights and best interests, parental responsibility, and an adequate standard of living (as set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child).

• A system grounded in the understanding that trauma (such as parental separation and domestic abuse) has wide reaching impacts on the health and wellbeing of families.

• Culture change so that the system views child maintenance as an entitlement, rather than families being ‘lucky’ if they have a reliable financial arrangement.

If we can agree the fundamental principles of the system itself and design it to meet these needs – rather than those of the state – then surely the result would be radically improved?

Laura Millar is strategic manager of Fife Gingerbread, which specialises in engaging lone parents and families in need. Find out more about their work at fifegingerbread.org.uk

This article was originally published in the Spring/Summer issue of Insight magazine, the membership magazine of national charity Children in Scotland. Find out more about Insight at https://childreninscotland.org.uk/insight-landing-page-public