19/06/2026
🙏 Thank you to everyone who supported and signed our open letter to the Prime Minister calling for reform of the child maintenance system.
📨 We have now received a response from Baroness Maeve Sherlock, Minister for Lords at the Department for Work and Pensions, following our call for change.
📝 We will publish a fuller response in due course, but here is a brief overview of what the Minister's letter does, and does not, say:
🏛️ The response, alongside the recent House of Lords debate on Child Maintenance Service (CMS) reform, shows growing cross-party recognition that the system is not working for too many children and families, particularly victim-survivors of domestic and economic abuse.
✅ We welcome commitments to:
• Reduce CMS fees (although we continue to call for them to be abolished altogether)
• Include unearned income in child maintenance calculations
• Lower the threshold for recalculating payments when a paying parent's income changes from 25% to 15%
• Plans to improve local support for parents applying for child maintenance
⚠️ However, many of the recommendations put forward by OPFS, single parents, and our partners IPPR Scotland and have not been fully addressed.
The response does not commit to:
• Scrapping CMS fees
• Replacing Collect and Pay and Direct Pay with a more accessible platform for all separated families
• Delivering the wider reforms needed to create a child maintenance system that consistently puts children's needs first
💜 Your support helped bring these issues to the attention of decision-makers and keep pressure on the UK Government to act. Thank you for standing with us.
We'll continue to push for a fairer, more effective child maintenance system.
👀 Watch out for news soon about support available across Scotland for single parent families navigating the CMS.
👓 Read the Minister's response: https://opfs.org.uk/get-involved/news-and-events/news/open-letter-response-child-maintenance/
