Parents report CMS errors, arrears and court battles over child support

John Hammond says almost £20,000 was taken from his bank account for child maintenance he did not owe, turning an old family case into a financial fight that stretched across decades. He is one of more than 30 parents who told BBC Your Voice they had faced miscalculated arrears, money wrongly taken from wages or bank accounts, and long court battles over Child Maintenance Service decisions.

Hammond’s case began with a Child Support Agency letter in September 2002 saying he owed £947, though that debt was not to be collected at his ex-wife’s request. Then, in 2019, he received a Child Maintenance Service letter saying he owed almost £19,000. He disputed the figure, but the case shows how disputes linked to arrangements made years or even decades earlier can still trigger sudden demands, deductions and legal costs for families.

The Child Maintenance Service replaced the Child Support Agency in 2012, with reforms meant to make child support cheaper to run and easier to enforce. The service calculates maintenance, arranges payments and can take money directly from wages, bank accounts, benefits or pensions when parents cannot agree privately or when arrears have to be recovered. Official figures show the scale of the system: the CMS received 150,000 new applications in the year to September 2025, was managing 790,000 arrangements for 720,000 paying parents at the end of September 2025, and by December 2025 was managing 800,000 arrangements for the same number of paying parents, covering 1.1 million children.

The complaints data point to persistent strain inside the system. The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman recorded 432 complaints about the CMS in 2024 to 2025, with nine accepted for detailed investigation. In October 2025, the House of Lords Public Services Committee said demand for the service remained significant and highlighted problems with communications, enforcement, shared care, hidden income and support for victims and survivors of domestic abuse.

Campaigners say the consequences go far beyond paperwork. Gingerbread’s Fix the CMS report, published in November 2024 and based on 24 interviews, 1,622 survey responses and freedom of information requests to the Department for Work and Pensions, found children going without essentials because maintenance was not arriving, parents facing worsening stress and relationships, and people who had experienced domestic abuse struggling to feel protected by the system. The pattern emerging from the latest complaints suggests the problem is not just a few isolated mistakes, but a system still struggling with calculation, collection and accountability.