Parents wrongly hit with thousands in child maintenance debts by UK system

John Hammond was standing in the staff room at his new school, checking his banking app during lunch, when he discovered that £20,000 had vanished from his account. The money had been taken by the Child Maintenance Service, the government body responsible for collecting child support payments. Hammond's children were 25 and 28 years old. His child support obligation had ended more than a decade earlier. At 56, sitting among his teaching colleagues, he found himself shaking so hard that others noticed something was wrong.

Hammond's case is one of at least 30 documented by the BBC in which the CMS has extracted money from parents for child support arrangements that had long since concluded. The Child Maintenance Service, which replaced the Child Support Agency in 2012, uses a formula to calculate what parents owe and has broad powers to collect: it can take money directly from wages, bank accounts, benefits, or pensions. It can also pursue arrears from years past. What Hammond and others discovered is that these enforcement powers can be wielded against people who owe nothing at all.

Hammond's troubles began in 2002 when he received a letter from the old CSA stating he owed £947 but that his ex-wife had requested they not collect it. He believed the matter was closed. Then, in 2019, a letter arrived saying he owed nearly £19,000. When he challenged the demand, sending copies of his original correspondence to the CMS, he encountered what he describes as a wall of bureaucratic confusion. Phone calls led nowhere. Staff told him they couldn't access his account or that their computer showed something different. In internal correspondence, the DWP itself admitted it was "unable to ascertain why" Hammond had been told he owed that sum. But while his appeal was still pending, the CMS obtained court orders and in December 2020 took £19,269 from his bank account without waiting for the dispute to be resolved.

A year later, a county court judge ruled in Hammond's favor, ordering the full amount returned and awarding him £8,000 in legal costs. But Hammond had already spent £14,055 on his own legal fees. Even after winning, he remained more than £6,000 out of pocket. "Even when you're proved right it doesn't feel like justice," he says. "It just feels like you've survived it."

Richard George, a 63-year-old founder of a fintech startup in Devon, experienced something similar. In late 2019, the CMS removed £18,800 from his bank account. George had believed his case was finished years earlier, in 2016, when an appeal tribunal had overturned a CSA decision against him and effectively written off more than £16,000 in arrears. The CSA had been wound down, and he thought the matter was done. What he didn't know was that CMS correspondence intended for him had been sent to the wrong address for years. Letters came back marked undelivered, but the CMS continued sending to that address anyway, even after George repeatedly confirmed his correct details by phone. It wasn't until 2023 that the CMS finally accepted the arrears should never have been carried over. The money was returned, but by then the damage was done. George describes the moment he discovered the deduction as triggering "the most horrendous adrenaline shock," like discovering a scammer had taken everything he had left.

A House of Lords report examining the CMS found a pattern. Parents reported that money had been taken "inappropriately" even as they were "trying to comply." One parent described the enforcement system as "random, abusive and unregulated." The report noted that enforcement "punishes the wrong people and ignores real avoidance." Beyond these enforcement failures, the Lords also found that the formula the CMS uses to calculate how much a parent should pay has remained unchanged for more than two decades and "is neither fair nor transparent." In 2025 alone, the CMS received 92,700 requests from parents to reconsider a decision. In 21,400 of those cases, the original decision was found to be wrong or incomplete—meaning nearly a quarter of all disputed decisions were changed. Yet the DWP does not publish data on how many of those disputes involve arrears notices or bank deductions.

The Department for Work and Pensions has committed to reviewing the CMS calculation model and says it is considering the Lords report's recommendations. But charities working with single parents say the pace is too slow. Abigail Wood, chief executive of Gingerbread, a charity for single parent families, said the CMS was "failing parents and children alike" and called for faster, deeper reform. Michelle Counley from the National Association for Child Support Action suggested that if the CMS worked with both parents together before imposing figures and enforcement, many disputes could be resolved early. Hammond and George both say they want to see an overhaul that prevents these mistakes from happening again. For Hammond, getting his money back was not a victory. "It was simply the end of a long fight to recover money that CMS had no right to take in the first place." For George, the money's return came "after years of fighting, and it didn't undo the impact it had on my health, my work or my life."