Richard Tice exposes another legacy scandal that deserves resolution

WELL DONE, RICHARD TICE. Earlier this week he announced Reform UK is calling for a full and thorough Parliamentary Inquiry into the Child Maintenance Service following ongoing warnings about poor safeguards and a lack of accountability over a thirty-year period. That takes us as far back as 1996.

Failings by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) under both the Conservatives and Labour have likely led to hundreds, possibly thousands, of deaths, as distraught parents are alleged to have committed suicide when faced with astronomical bills based on outdated calculation methods. There should now, according to Tice and Reform, be full transparency over the private contractors used in child maintenance enforcement.

The CMS manages 800,000 arrangements for 720,000 parents, according to 2025 figures from across Great Britain (Northern Ireland has its own service). It sets payment arrangements based on a paying parent’s income and claims its “assessment accuracy rates are consistently close to 100 per cent”.

If parents dispute a decision, they can appeal to an independent tribunal which will decide if it should be changed, the DWP claims. But this does not tally with the experiences of many separated families, with cash often being snatched directly from bank accounts.

In 2025, the CMS received over 90,000 requests from parents to reconsider a decision. In more than 21,000 cases, the original decision was found to be incorrect, or the parent supplied more information which changed the decision. Hardly confidence-inspiring!

A Parliamentary Inquiry would, Reform argues, investigate the accuracy of arrears still subject to enforcement from the time of its predecessor, the Child Support Agency, while examining evidence of alleged calculation errors and disputed debts.

Reform has therefore called for a full review of safeguarding procedures, welfare protections and internal review processes, alongside the prospect of new laws to guard against future failings. The National Audit Office has repeatedly qualified the Child Maintenance Client Funds Account because of uncertainty surrounding historic arrears balances inherited from legacy schemes.

In November 2022, Joshua Reddaway, Director of Fraud and Propriety at the National Audit Office, confirmed to the Work and Pensions Committee that the Department was continuing to pursue historic debts arising from the old CSA schemes, despite the acknowledged uncertainty surrounding those balances.

It is absolutely appalling that cases can lead to people taking their own lives

Parliament then heard even more disturbing evidence on 18 January 2023. When questioned about suicides among paying parents, Viscount Younger of Leckie stated: “I am already aware … of some absolutely tragic cases. It is absolutely appalling that cases can lead to people taking their own lives.”

Immediately afterwards, Arlene Sugden, Director of the Child Maintenance Service, confirmed that although the Department does not collect statistics on parental suicides, where a suicide becomes known the case is removed for a separate review and, where appropriate, subjected to an internal process review.

Thanks to FOI disclosures obtained from the DWP, it has been found that between 2016 and 2023 there were 8,772 reported paying parent deaths. Between 2020 and 2022 alone there were 4,959 reported paying parent deaths. The Department has confirmed that it does not routinely record the cause of death and would have to manually examine thousands of individual case files to determine whether suicides or common factors exist.

These figures do not, by themselves, establish causation. However, they unquestionably raise a serious public interest question: why has there never been an independent investigation into mortality, mental health and safeguarding among paying parents? The nature and scale of the parent deaths raise questions that could become more concerning than the thirteen recorded suicides linked to the Post Office computer scandal and the ten suicides linked to the HMRC loan charge scandal.

Many paying parents also complain that they have little or no effective opportunity to challenge the accuracy of CMS calculations before enforcement action is taken. Over many years, paying parents have reported alleged calculation errors, disputed arrears, enforcement action based on inaccurate records and repeated failures to investigate complaints. Many state they have reported their concerns to the police and Action Fraud, only to be informed that no further action would be taken.

An Inquiry and new legislation, as suggested by Richard Tice, cannot undo the wrongs committed in the past. But they can expose the truth, hold those responsible to account and guard against future failings and further needless tragedies at the hands of an incompetent state body.