Curfew and tags for parents missing child maintenance payments

 

Parents who break the tag restrictions and/or the curfew, may face a prison sentence. Courtesy of information released via the Child Maintenance Service (CMS), almost 61,000 parents failed to pay their child maintenance obligations in the first quarter of this year alone. It has been recorded that around half of children who do not live in the home of the other parent, receive no financial support from them. 

 

Gingerbread, a single parents charity, issuied a comment via their spokesperson Victoria Benson saying, "We welcome new powers for the CMS, but it already has the capacity to enforce child maintenance, the problem is these powers are very rarely used and arrears are allowed to build up over the years."

 

The government has said that 93% of parents failing to make the CMS payments, are male. In the eyes of the government, both parents are responsible for the costs of raising a child, whether the payments arranged privately or through the government run CMS.

 

Department for Work and Pensions parliamentary under-secretary, Baroness Deborah Stedman-Scott, said, "For children in low-income households, maintenance payments can make all the difference, lifting them out of poverty. Curfew orders are another step towards providing us with a full arsenal of powers to make sure children get the financial support they need to have the best start in life."

 

According to published figures, £475m of child maintenance was outstanding at the end of March this year. The DWP hopes the new restrictions would act as a deterrent by "disrupting the lifestyles" for parents shrinking their responsibilities.

 

Currently, the CMS can ask courts to confiscate passports, driving licences, deduct the outstanding payments from their earnings, and send parents to prison.