New regulations will help enforce child maintenance payments

The Government’s campaign to make more non-resident parents pay child maintenance takes another step forward with officials being given the right to extract more information from banks, credit reference agencies and the DVLA.

The Child Support (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2008, effective from 6th April, is intended to help develop a tougher enforcement regime by extending existing powers. For example, until now the Child Support Agency could only use the DVLA’s Vehicle Registration database for the purposes of tracing parents. Now the Agency will be able to use more detailed information available on the Driver Licensing database for collection and enforcement purposes.

The Department for Work and Pensions believes that “using information from both databases will increase compliance, free-up resources, reduce processing times and support longer term aims of reducing uncleared work to acceptable levels by 2009”.

The regulations will also increase the purposes for which the Agency can request information from credit reference agencies to include collection and enforcement, and in particular to support payment of arrears of child maintenance. It will also be easier for the Agency to get information from deposit takers such as banks and building societies.

Many of the changes may seem technical but they are designed to get more parents paying maintenance. They also demonstrate the Government’s determination to address the problem following widespread criticism of the Child Support Agency in recent years. The Agency is being replaced by the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (CMEC). The Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill now going through parliament is set to bring more changes.

We shall keep clients informed of developments.