The Draft Child Support Management of Payments and Arrears (Amendment) Regulations 2012
Start date 19 December 2012
End date 12 March 2012
This consultation concerned new arrears management powers allowing the Department to efficiently manage the level of child maintenance arrears that have previously accumulated.
The Department remains committed to pursuing arrears of child maintenance and ensuring that parents meet their financial responsibilities for their children. Arrears remain due, parents will not be relieved of their liability to pay and the Department will (as now) continue to pursue arrears whenever a parent with care wishes and to do so is in accordance with the legal obligations and established policies. The proposed implementation of the debt management powers does not therefore represent a significant change of policy.
These powers will, however, aid the Department in bringing to a resolution a small minority of cases where the arrears are unlikely to ever be collected in full.
Government response
We published the Government response to this consultation on 15 October 2012.
The consultation
Equality Analysis
We published this Equality Analysis on 15 October 2012.
More information
This consultation was originally published by the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (“the Commission”). The Commission was the Government body responsible for the child maintenance system and was established through the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008. The Commission was abolished on the 31 July 2012 and subsumed into the Department for Work and Pensions (“the Department”) as “Child Maintenance Group”. The Child Support Agency now functions as one of the operational arms of the DWP providing the Government’s statutory maintenance service.
