Imagine opening a letter to find you owe thousands of pounds in child maintenance arrears for payments you’ve already made. Now imagine that happening again, and again, and nobody at the Child Maintenance Service picks up the phone to fix it.
That’s the reality John Hammond has been living with. He’s one of 30 parents who contacted BBC Your Voice to share their experiences with the Child Maintenance Service, or CMS, and the stories they told make for grim reading.
Hammond says the service incorrectly pursued him for £20,000 he simply didn’t owe. Payments he’d made on time, properly recorded, somehow vanished from the system. The debt appeared from nowhere, and the burden of proof fell squarely on him.
“They took £20,000 I didn’t owe,” he said, describing a process that left him financially drained and emotionally exhausted.
He’s far from alone. The 30 parents who came forward described a pattern of administrative errors, missed payments, wrongly calculated arrears, and a complaints process that felt designed to wear people down rather than resolve anything. Some had been fighting their cases for years.
The CMS handles child maintenance arrangements for separated families across the UK, collecting and transferring payments when parents can’t agree privately. It manages millions of pounds every year, and for the families involved, those payments aren’t abstract figures. They’re school uniforms, heating bills, food on the table.
When the system gets it wrong, the consequences are serious. Parents on the receiving end of incorrect debt notices can face enforcement action, damaged credit ratings, and months of stressful correspondence with a government body that can feel impossible to navigate.
A Department for Work and Pensions spokesperson said the CMS handles around 850,000 cases and that the vast majority are managed correctly. They acknowledged that errors do occur and said they’re committed to resolving complaints fairly and promptly.
For the parents still waiting for resolution, that commitment doesn’t feel especially reassuring right now.
With calls growing louder for an independent review of the service, the question is whether the government will act before even more families find themselves fighting a bureaucratic battle they never asked for.
