29 Apr 2009
The Child Support Agency (CSA) has collected or arranged more than £100m in maintenance in a single month for the first time ever, according to the government.
The CSA – responsible for relaying child support payments between separated families - has begun to improve its clearance rate thanks to an Operational Improvement Plan designed to make it more efficient.
First created in the 1990s, the CSA has had a history fraught with failure. The Department of Work and Pensions estimated last year that some £3.5bn of maintenance payment had not been collected by the agency since its inception, 60 per cent of which is now considered uncollectable, largely due to IT problems.
But the government says annual child maintenance payments have soared by 42 per cent year with £1.13bn being collected or arranged by the agency in the year to March 2009, and the recovery of maintenance arrears has more than doubled annually to more than £158m in 2008/9.
The CSA is now overseen by the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission.
"Thanks to the commitment shown by the agency's people, I believe that we have started delivering results that instil greater confidence in the child maintenance service," said Child Maintenance Commissioner and former CSA chief executive Stephen Geraghty.
"These are firm foundations on which the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission will build as it develops the entirely new maintenance scheme that will replace the CSA's schemes from 2011."
The second phase of the improvement scheme will see £50m worth of new systems from Indian supplier TCS as the commission looks to replace the IT that caused the CSA so much trouble.
This report appears to have been created as an attempt to save the face of the failing Child Support Agency.
I am a private client with CSA and have been chasing my arrears for 16 months which total nearly £5k to date, and are still growing despite an attachment to earnings order that seems to never follow through.
Despite weekly calls over the 16 month period, a complaint, and still NO result, my children are suffering because of the massive failings of the CSA.
I feel that if I was claiming benefit and not working then my case would be a priority as the money would go straight back into the government's purse.
If this was a private organisation then it would have not survived and would not be such a drain on public resources. They seems to escape scrutiny and investigation when no other government organisation can behave and fail on such a massive scale.
It is in my opinion that the CSA should be disbanded and privatised immediately and stop the suffering for all children that are tangled up in this monstrous, barbaric and chaotic system.
Posted by: Leeanne Rowe 15 Jan 2010
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