CSA reform 'is one of the great disasters'

One of the most damning Commons reports ever written warns that the cases of 275,000 parents waiting for child maintenance remain stuck in the CSA's inadequate computer system.

More than one in three absent parents is failing to pay any of the money they owe, leaving £3.5billion in uncollected maintenance, according to the Public Accounts Committee.

On the current rate of progress, parents face a "long wait" before they see any of the money to which they are entitled from ex-partners, it warns.

The Government spent £91million bringing in external advisers to sort out the mess but there are no records of where more than a third of the money went.

The CSA was set up by the Tories in 1993. Since Labour came to power in 1997, seven different ministers have been in charge of the Department for Work and Pensions, which oversees its work.

The report says the Government allowed the CSA to "throw huge sums" at a computer system introduced in 2003 which was a "turkey from day one" and still had more than 500 defects three years after it was introduced.

If reforms brought in since 2000 had worked as intended, an additional 50,000 children could have been lifted out of poverty, even without any increase in rates of compliance by absent parents, the committee found.

Overall, the cost of attempted reforms to the CSA will total more than £850million by the time it is phased out.

Transition of cases to the new Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission will not be complete until 2013.

Yet all that cash has failed to deliver vital improvements to efficiency and service, the MPs warn.

They say 60 per cent of the £3.5billion owed by absent parents is now considered "uncollectable".

Around 2,500 parents have been allowed to rack up debts of more than £50,000.

But the weakness of efforts to track down then punish "deadbeat dads" has led to a "culture of non-compliance" among absent parents, the MPs argue.

Punishments trumpeted by ministers have been woefully underused. Last year, failure to pay maintenance led to only 15 jail sentences and five driving licences being confiscated.

The report calls for the Treasury to consider giving the commission powers to look at individual tax records to determine absent parents' income, and use the tax system to collect arrears if they refuse to co-operate, as happens in Australia.

Tory MP Edward Leigh, who chairs the cross-party Public Accounts Committee, said: "The reform of the CSA has been one of the greatest public administration disasters of recent times.

"It took 13 years of failure for the department to reach the conclusion that the agency was not fit for purpose.

"During this time, thousands of children suffered as thousands of absent parents neglected their duties."

He said the Government had to "keep an iron grip" on the CMEC "to ensure that the lessons have been learned from the CSA debacle".

In the Commons, Work and Pensions Secretary Peter Hain insisted the commission would "mark a clean break with the past".

It could deduct cash direct from non-payers' bank accounts, impose curfews and withdraw passports, he said.