“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Joseph Goebbels

The following pages forensically analyse the lies that ministers told about child maintenance. They provide empirical evidence of a deliberate strategy of lies, and of a script which all ministers stuck to religiously throughout.

They are a masterclass in how politicians repeat lies over and over until they become accepted as part of the established, unchallenged narrative.

The consultation on the child maintenance reforms was a sham. The Government’s response to the consultation featured four quotes from the Centre for Separated Families (Samantha Callan and Iain Duncan Smith’s protégés), three quotes from Care for the Family (the fundamentalist Christian charity Samantha Callan had worked for since at least 2001), three quotes from Families Need Fathers and Jewish Unity for Multiple Parenting (which consisted of one woman who was Karen Woodall’s friend) and even a quote from the Centre for Social Justice.

The Child Support Agency was conflated with welfare benefits. Although there was a degree of correlation, in that many single mothers with CSA cases were also in receipt of Income Support, it was unfair to imply that the CSA was effectively a welfare benefit. It was the Conservative Government which introduced the CSA in 1993, removing the right of mothers to pursue child support themselves via the courts, and compelling mothers on Income Support to apply to the CSA or face benefit sanctions. The compulsion element was lifted in 2008, but the prohibition on pursuing child maintenance individually through the courts still stands. If mothers cannot persuade fathers to pay child support voluntarily, the statutory system is their only option, whether or not they are in receipt of welfare benefits.

Mothers used the CSA as “the default option” or as a “weapon” against fathers. This lie was inspired primarily by Karen and Nick Woodall of the Centre for Separated Families. In fact, the Department for Work and Pensions’ own evidence, and the outgoing Chief Executive of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission, confirmed that the problem was in fact the opposite: those mothers who did approach the CSA did so only as a “last resort”, while many avoided the CSA and simply did without any child support. The slur that mothers used the CSA as a weapon was inspired by Nick Woodall’s resentment towards his first wife and related to the “1993 scheme”. The problems which enabled mothers to "use the CSA as a weapon” had been ironed out in the “2003 scheme”.

More than half of CSA parents wanted to make “family based arrangements”. This was an outright and deliberate lie, repeated multiple times between 2011 and 2014, on the advice of Dr Christine Skinner of York University, who was a former Vice Chair of Trustees of the Centre for Separated Families. It was based on research conducted in 2007, before the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008 removed the compulsion on Income Support claimants to apply to the CSA. Furthermore, the research was deliberately misrepresented: most CSA parents did not want to make “family based arrangements” if a website and helpline were the only types of support offered to help them do so.

The cost of a “typical” CSA case was £25,000 to £40,000. Another deliberate lie concocted by civil servant, Noel Shanahan at Maria Miller’s request. On the day of a crucial vote in the House of Lords, Maria Miller gave birth to the lie that a “typical” CSA case cost the tax payer £25,000, rising to £40,000 if enforcement was needed. The true figure was around £4,000 over the lifetime of a case.

The child maintenance reforms are a success. Ministers have repeatedly claimed that the child maintenance reforms are a resounding success and that many more children than before are “benefiting”. The Child Support Agency’s statutory objective to maximise the number of children with effective maintenance arrangements was not transferred to the new Child Maintenance Service. Instead, the CMS claims arrangements are “effective” if as little as one penny is paid in a thirteen week period.

Collection fees for the statutory child maintenance service would be 4% for mothers and 20% for fathers. In reality, if fathers refuse to pay at all, they do not pay a 20% collection fee either. With almost zero prospect of enforcement, the fee is not an incentive to pay. If fathers pay less than what they owe, the CMS deducts 20% instead of 4% from whatever it receives before paying the remaining 80% to mothers. Mothers and children are punished for fathers’ underpayments.

On 14 February 2011 Maria Miller told several lies in a written answer to Labour MP, Bridget Phillipson.

On 7 March 2011 Maria Miller promoted the child maintenance reforms on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, lying that more than half of parents using the Child Support Agency wanted to make their own private arrangements, and falsely claiming that parents would receive support to help them do so.

On 23 March 2011 Maria Miller took part in a live web chat on the NetMums website, during which she blithely ignored the outrage, despair and bewilderment of all the mothers who participated, and told several lies.

On 15 June 2011 Maria Miller gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee, and the lies flowed thick and fast.

At the end of the debate, rejecting Lord Mackay’s amendment, Lord De Mauley repeated several lies for good measure. He also falsely reassured Peers about the helpline:

“The noble Baroness asked about the people who take the calls. Advisers will be using training which has been developed with the input of a large number of voluntary and community experts. Self-declaration of domestic violence will be sufficient, and no application charge will need to be paid.”

In fact, the contract to train helpline advisers was awarded to the Centre for Separated Families. Karen and Nick Woodall, who ran the Centre for Separated Charities, are fathers’ rights fanatics who despised the Child Support Agency as a “horrendous state intervention into family life” and a “spiteful, faceless bureaucracy that purports to be about children’s well being but in reality is simply state sponsored robbery”. The Woodalls believed that most allegations of domestic violence are fabricated or exaggerated by controlling, vindictive mothers wishing to avoid the application fee for the replacement statutory child maintenance service. Their views were well known to the minister responsible for child maintenance, Maria Miller, and were precisely why they were selected as the cheerleaders for the reforms by Samantha Callan, Iain Duncan Smith’s Special Adviser, whom he brought to the Department for Work and Pensions from the Centre for Social Justice.

Furthermore, one of the first organisations to receive the helpline advisor training was Wikivorce, run by Ruth Langford and her second husband, Nick Langford, who was a senior researcher and political adviser for Fathers 4 Justice from 2005 to 2012. Like the Woodalls, Nick Langford vehemently believed that the family courts and the Child Support Agency were in thrall to a feminist cult of false allegations of domestic violence and child abuse.

On 29 January 2012 Iain Duncan Smith was interviewed about the Welfare Reform Bill on BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.

On 1 February 2012 Maria told various lies to the House of Commons, repeating several times that more than half of parents with CSA cases were practically clamouring for the chance to make “family based arrangements” even though they had been free to do so since 2008, and falsely claiming that a typical CSA case cost £25,000 to £40,000 when the true cost was around £4,000.