Our standards
The Commission operates two main services, an Information and support service provided by Child Maintenance Options and the statutory maintenance service (currently operated by the Child Support Agency). Specific standards have been set for each of the services and the two delivery bodies will aim to meet these at all times in order to provide a high quality service to our clients.
Child Maintenance Options
Telephony
We aim to answer telephone calls within one minute.
Calling clients within agreed timescales
We aim to contact clients within three working days of them agreeing to be referred by a partner organisation with whom we have formal referral arrangements or within other timescales agreed with the client.
Quality of service
We aim to provide a quality service which helps clients understand their child maintenance options and the support available to them. We aim to achieve minimum overall customer satisfaction levels of 75% from users of the service.
Child Support Agency
Telephony
We aim to answer telephone calls within one minute.
First Contact
If the parent with care can give us contact details for the non-resident parent, we will start gathering information from the non-resident parent within four weeks of getting the application. We aim to make an accurate decision about the application within 12 weeks.
In some cases this may take as long as 26 weeks, for example where we might not have the right contact details for the non-resident parent. We will try to track them down as quickly as we can but it might take us longer to process applications like these. We will not be able to do anything further with the application if we cannot find the non-resident parent. However this only happens in a small number of cases.
First Payment
In those cases where we handle payments of child maintenance, we aim to get the first payment to the parent with care within six weeks from when we arranged payments with the non-resident parent.
If the non-resident parent has a job but fails or refuses to pay, we will try to get money straight from their wages through a deduction from earnings order. We aim to do this within four months from when we first told them the amount they had to pay.
If the non-resident parent has still not paid four months after we arranged payment with them, we will refer the case to a special team within the CSA who will take further enforcement action.
Speed of Payment
We will make maintenance payments to parents with care within a week of receiving the money from the non-resident parent.
Complaints
We aim to reply to letters and either resolve, or agree a plan to resolve, complaints within three weeks of receiving them.
Accuracy
We will aim to provide an accurate calculation of the maintenance liability. Accuracy is defined by whether the weekly assessment is within £1 or 2 per cent of the correct liability, whichever is the greater.
Appeals
There are up to three stages to the process for disputing our decision.
Stage 1 - We will look why you think we have made the wrong decision. We will either:
- change the decision about how much maintenance should be paid ourselves, or
- ask the Tribunals Service to look at your case. This might be because we are not able to make a decision because your case is more complicated.
Around half of all appeals are resolved within the CSA at this stage. This stage will take around 10 weeks.
Stage 2 - If the Tribunals Service is dealing with your dispute, they will look into it and let us know the decision they have made within 19 weeks of the case being sent to them.
The Tribunals Service is part of the Ministry of Justice and carries out administrative work for the main central government departments. The people who the Tribunals Service ask to look at your case are not part of the CSA and they will make sure that a fair and accurate decision has been made.
Stage 3- Once the Tribunals Service has let us know about their decision, we will change your child maintenance calculation if they tell us this was wrong. This stage usually takes about a week.