LONDON — Thousands of parents across the United Kingdom say they have been wrongly pursued for child maintenance payments they never owed, with some families losing tens of thousands of pounds to enforcement actions triggered by administrative errors inside the government’s Child Maintenance Service. A parliamentary inquiry published Thursday found that at least 14,000 families had been affected by miscalculations since the agency completed a major software migration in late 2022, and that it had collected an estimated £47 million in incorrect charges that it has yet to fully repay. The report described the situation as a systemic failure that had caused serious and lasting financial harm to some of the country’s most financially precarious households.
The root of the problem lies in a platform transition that the Child Maintenance Service undertook when it moved legacy case files to a new digital system. Investigators found that roughly six percent of migrated records contained income-assessment errors, causing the system to substantially overstate what so-called paying parents owed in arrears. In many cases, enforcement orders — including wage garnishments, frozen bank accounts, and referrals to third-party debt collection agencies — were issued automatically before the mistakes were caught or disputed. Parents who tried to flag the errors through official channels found themselves directed into a complaints process that the parliamentary committee said averaged 23 weeks from first submission to final resolution.
Martin Holloway, a warehouse supervisor from Nottingham, told StudioKit News that his bank account was frozen for eleven weeks after the agency calculated he owed £20,400 in arrears. He said the figure was based on an income assessment that doubled his actual earnings. “I had direct debits bouncing, I couldn’t pay my mortgage, I couldn’t buy food for my kids,” Holloway said. “When I finally got someone on the phone, they said it would take eight to twelve weeks to investigate. Eight to twelve weeks — that is not a service, that is a punishment.” Holloway said he eventually received a letter confirming the error and a partial repayment, but that the process had taken fourteen months and required him to engage a debt charity as an intermediary.
The parliamentary inquiry, led by the cross-party Work and Welfare Committee, heard testimony from 312 affected families over four months of hearings. The committee’s chair, Councillor Patricia Acheampong, said the scale of the problem reflected a structural failure in the agency’s quality-assurance and enforcement processes rather than isolated clerical mistakes. “What we found was not a handful of edge cases,” Acheampong said in a statement accompanying the report. “We found a broken feedback loop in which errors were internally flagged but enforcement was not paused, and families were left to navigate a complaints process that was wholly inadequate for the volume of cases it was receiving.” The committee recommended an immediate moratorium on new enforcement actions in any case where a data migration flag had been raised.
The Child Maintenance Service acknowledged in a written submission to the committee that 9,800 cases had been identified for formal review as of April 2026, and that repayments totalling £31.6 million had been issued to date. However, campaigners said that figure substantially understated the true scope of the problem, because many parents remained unaware they had a right to appeal and because a significant number of those who did receive repayments were offered only partial restitution. The agency’s internal ombudsman received 2,100 escalated complaints in 2025, a rise of 67 percent compared with the previous year, and its average case-handling time lengthened by 34 days over the same period.
Welfare analysts said the crisis illustrated the risks of compressing the timeline for large-scale digital migrations in public services without adequate parallel-running periods and independent testing. “The government saved money on the transition by cutting the parallel-running phase from eighteen months to six,” said Dr. Sanjay Mehta, a public-administration researcher at the University of Central England. “The total cost of rectifying the mistakes — including staff overtime, legal fees, and repayments — now comfortably exceeds the original saving by a factor of several times.” Mehta said the case was likely to be cited as a cautionary example in future public-sector procurement guidance.
Opposition lawmakers called for an independent audit of all cases processed through the new platform since January 2023, as well as automatic compensation of £500 for every family subjected to a wrongful enforcement action. The government resisted legislating a fixed figure, saying it preferred to handle cases on an individual basis. A spokesperson for the Department for Work and Pensions said the department “deeply regrets” the distress caused to affected families and committed to clearing the remaining backlog of disputed cases by the end of the third quarter of the year. For Holloway and thousands of others, that commitment came far too late. “I got a letter last week telling me my case was still under review,” he said. “It was dated seven months ago.”