Remit

The Commission has three core functions:

to promote the financial responsibility that parents have for their children;
to provide information and support on the different child maintenance options available;
to provide an efficient statutory maintenance service, with effective enforcement.

This is a wider remit than the Child Support Agency (CSA) has, which is to provide the statutory maintenance service.

The wide-ranging changes introduced by the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act address the constraints and weaknesses of the current system, and are delivering simpler, more transparent and cost-effective services. The changes include:

extending the same options for arranging child maintenance to all parents, by removing the requirement for parents with the main day-to-day care who are claiming benefits to use the statutory scheme. This has enabled all parents to choose the arrangements - private or statutory - which best suit their circumstances;
ensuring more money is delivered to lower income families, by extending and increasing the benefit disregard;
providing an information and support service (Child Maintenance Options) to enable parents to make an informed choice about whether private or statutory arrangements are most suited to their circumstances;
improving the debt collection process and tackling non-compliance through an enhanced enforcement regime. This will be introduced in 2009/10;
simplifying and streamlining assessments for the statutory maintenance service. This will take effect from 2011.

The Commission is continuing the significant improvements made to the current statutory schemes, as part of the CSA’s Operational Improvement Plan.