Karen Buck – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Karen Buck on 2015-11-25.
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate his Department has made of the cost of cleansing the arrears balances of all existing Child Support Agency cases and establishing those costs on the 2012 statutory scheme.
Priti Patel
The Department is committed to closing the old child maintenance case management system. In the process of doing this the Department will bring cases up to date, correct obvious inaccuracies, and write off arrears where appropriate, for which there will be a temporary cost within the £236m outlined in the impact assessment that the Department published in 2013.
The cost of caseworker activity to review and update arrears on the existing systems for the 1.2m CSA cases expected to have an arrears balance is estimated to be £75m. This comprises: bringing all outstanding actions on the case up to date; reviewing the outstanding balance to incorporate those actions and eliminate obvious errors; establish whether the receiving parent wishes to write off any or all of the balance and take write off action if appropriate; and take the control actions to mark the case as closed.
Establishing those arrears on the new Child Maintenance system is estimated to cost £25m. This comprises: action to add the arrears to the schedule of amounts due produced by the 2012 system; and ensuring that where more than one receiving parent is due maintenance from the same paying parent, outstanding balances from the 1993 and 2003 schemes are correctly allocated.
