CSA in ‘meltdown’ warns former minister

The Child Support Agency is in ‘meltdown’, the former welfare minister has warned.

In an open letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair, Frank Field said that the CSA was now performing worse than it did in 1998, a year after Labour first came to power.

Mr Field, Labour MP for Birkenhead, said that the agency had now written off £1 billion of uncollected maintenance, while the backlog of applicants waiting for an assessment had increased by a fifth in the last six months. The amount of maintenance being collected had also fallen by 2% in real terms, he claimed.

The former minister said that government reforms introduced two years ago, which included a new IT system costing £456 million, had not helped – instead, he said, it had made “an intolerably poor service even worse”.

The cost to the taxpayer of running the CSA was now 54p for every pound of maintenance collected, Mr Field claimed.

Work and Pensions Secretary David Blunkett said that there was nothing in Mr Field’s letter that that ministers were not “painfully aware” of. He said that a government review, implemented after the general election, would be “root and branch” and welcomed “positive ideas”, which could be incorporated into the review, due to be published before the end of the year.

Lord Hunt, the minister responsible for the CSA, admitted that the agency had had a difficult time, but said it was now dealing with a million extra child support cases.

Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesperson David Laws called for the CSA to be scrapped and its responsibilities given to the Inland Revenue. He said: "It is clear that the CSA is in a state of chaos, and that it needs the most fundamental reform rather than tinkering. The chaotic status of the CSA is indicated by the fact that now people have almost given up making complaints because the CSA has been so incompetent for so long.”

(KMcA/SP)