Recommendation 22

The Department’s legislation for child maintenance is designed to encourage parents to use Direct Pay first, but around half of Direct Pay arrangements are either not sustained or not effective. The Department told us that it preferred parents using its CMS to have a Direct Pay arrangement as it believed this created a more positive environment for co- parenting. The Department charges fees for its Collect & Pay service to encourage parents to try Direct Pay arrangements first. Under child maintenance legislation, unless both parents agree to start on Collect & Pay, there must be clear evidence that the paying parent is unlikely to pay voluntarily in order to use Collect & Pay. As a result, 90% of separated families using CMS start with Direct Pay. However, only 58% of parents responding to a Department survey 13 months after their Direct Pay calculation were still on Direct Pay, of which 16% did not receive the full amount of maintenance.45 Receiving parents who indicated that they would have preferred to start on a Collect & Pay arrangement were much less likely to have an effective Direct Pay arrangement.46