Information withholders to be named
The Child Support Agency (CSA) intend to publish information on our website about non-resident parents who have been taken to court and successfully prosecuted for an information offence. We feel that taking this action and making an example of those who commit these offences will encourage other non-resident parents to give us the information we need straight away. The parent was prosecuted because they did not give us the information we needed to deal with a child maintenance application, or gave us information that they knew to be false.
The CSA intention is to make it clear that it is not acceptable for non-resident parents to fail to support their children. The CSA want to get more money flowing to more children, and one way of doing this is to convince non-resident parents who don't pay that we are serious about taking action to recover what they owe.
The information we will publish is
- Non-resident parent's name;
- the type of offence they committed;
- the sentence or fine they received;
- the court the case took place in;
- the date of the court hearing
All of this information is already available to the public if requested. We will not publish any information about the children involved, or the parent with care.
In every case, we are writing to the parent with care with the option to opt-out of the non-resident parent's details appearing on our website. We will not publish any details if we receive an opt-out form. Around 100 letters will be sent out this week, covering prosecutions between January and March this year.
The Child Maintenance Bill
The Child Maintenance Bill has been published today. It marks the next stage of the Government's fundamental reform of the system of child maintenance. The reforms will see the Child Support Agency being replaced by the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (C-MEC), which will operate at arms length from government and with tougher powers.
Measures in the Child Maintenance Bill include:
- Removing the requirement that parents with care on benefit use the CSA (or C-MEC) to establish maintenance payments, giving them more choice over their arrangements;
- Allowing C-MEC to take money out of people's bank accounts when they will not co-operate with other collection methods and Deduction from Earnings Orders cannot be used;
- Simplifying the assessment process by using latest available tax-year information and, where possible, fixing the award for a year, thereby providing parents with more certainty on the amount of maintenance to be paid.
There will be no immediate change for the existing CSA, which will continue to operate until late 2008. The Agency remains firmly open for business and will continue to increase its focus on compliance and enforcement as part its three year Operational Improvement Plan. We will intensify and increase our efforts to improve our client services and get more money flowing to more children.
Further information on the Bill
[PDF 400Kb] 
