Child Maintenance Service Seizes Thousands From Parents' Bank Accounts In Error
John Hammond, a maths teacher from Peterborough, discovered a deduction of £20,000 from his bank account by the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) in December 2020. This occurred despite his child support arrangement concluding over a decade prior, with his children aged 25 and 28 at the time of the seizure. Hammond, who had previously been informed by the now-defunct Child Support Agency (CSA) in 2002 that a £947 debt would not be collected, received a CMS demand in 2019 for nearly £19,000.
After disputing the CMS claim and providing documentation, the CMS proceeded with interim and final lump sum deduction orders. Hammond subsequently won his appeal a year later, with a county court judge ordering the full sum's return and awarding £8,000 in legal costs. However, Hammond reports remaining over £6,000 out of pocket due to £14,055 in legal fees.
Similarly, Richard George, a fintech founder from Devon, had £18,800 taken from his bank by the CMS. George's case stemmed from a 2016 tribunal decision that effectively wrote off over £16,000 in CSA arrears. He later discovered that CMS correspondence had been misdirected for several years. The CMS eventually accepted the arrears should not have been carried over and returned the money, but only after years of contention.
These experiences align with concerns raised in a House of Lords report, "Reforming the Child Maintenance Service," which described enforcement as "random, abusive and unregulated." The report, published in October 2025, also criticised the CMS calculation formula as "outdated" and not reflective of modern family structures. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which oversees the CMS, maintains that enforcement is a last resort and that assessment accuracy rates are consistently close to 100%. However, DWP figures for 2025 show that almost a quarter of CMS decisions reconsidered were found to be incorrect or altered by new information.
Organisations such as Gingerbread and the National Association for Child Support Action (NACSA) have called for substantial reforms, advocating for a fairer and more transparent system to prevent such errors and their significant personal impact.
