“Our child focused, gender aware practice underpins the delivery of Child Maintenance Options, a service we helped to develop in 2008 and which offers parents the information that can help them to make their own arrangements in providing financially for their children after separation.”
On 24 October 2013 the Department for Work and Pensions submitted written evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee:
“Child Maintenance Options is a national service that gives free and impartial information and support to help both parents make informed choices about child maintenance. It can be contacted via telephone, email or live chat. By July 2012, an estimated 149,000 children were benefiting from an effective family-based arrangement put in place following contact with the Child Maintenance Options service.
In addition to providing general support to anyone wishing to find out about child maintenance, the Child Maintenance Options service will deliver the mandatory child maintenance ‘Gateway’ conversation. When the Child Maintenance Service is opened up to all new applicants, everyone wishing to make an application to the Child Maintenance Service will be required to go through the Gateway.
The Gateway will be flexible and personalised to each individual. It will ensure that parents consider the full range of options before making an application to the Child Maintenance Service so the statutory service no longer remains the default option. Where appropriate, it will promote the benefits of making a family-based arrangement with parents, help them overcome the barriers they face to working together and provide them with the tools to make effective arrangements.
Those who have declared they are victims of domestic violence will be fast-tracked through the Gateway.”
On 4 February 2014 Lord Freud told the House of Lords: “Those making an application to the statutory scheme will be invited to enter into a discussion with the Child Maintenance Options service, which provides free, impartial information and support on the various ways to set up maintenance arrangements. This conversation gives parents the information they need to consider what is the best arrangement for them.”
In November 2016 the single parent charity Gingerbread submitted written evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee:
18. CM Options – though not strictly speaking part of the CMS, but introduced as part of the reforms and compulsory gateway to the new statutory service – has been received positively in some ways. Staff are largely seen as polite and the different information formats (telephone, online and printed) generally meet parents’ different preferences.
19. The quality of CM Options service in terms of outcomes for parents is still unclear. 2015/16 data shows that over half (55 per cent) were dissatisfied with their visit to the CM Options website.1 Only two-fifths felt they got most of what they wanted from their visit; only a third (34 per cent) felt it was easy to find information… CM Options staff can be polite, but can place undue pressure to consider FBAs.
23. The pressure placed on receiving parents to consider FBAs can be inappropriate. This is clear from the first ‘gateway conversation’ with CM Options, where some parents report undue pressure towards FBAs. This may be in part due to the ‘script’ [written by Karen and Nick Woodall] that CM Options telephony staff are instructed to use. In other cases, staff have provided poor advice. This runs counter to DWP statements that reforms would ensure parents used the “most appropriate service for [parents]” (DWP, 2013c). It is clear that the policy push and/or resulting training does not result in the neutral, independent information espoused by the service.
25. Our evidence (Gingerbread, 2016) suggests the complexities around how and when domestic abuse can arise are not fully recognised or understood, meaning they can be ignored by current fee exemption policy (even if this contravenes the cross-government definition of domestic violence). [This is because Child Maintenance Options staff were trained by Karen and Nick Woodall, and they vehemently disagree with the the cross-government definition of domestic violence!]
27. These issues are exacerbated by a poor understanding among some DWP staff regarding the complexity of domestic abuse, particularly financial abuse. Indeed, according to CMS staff, caseworkers received no specific training on domestic abuse.”
On 21 April 2017 I contacted Child Maintenance Options’ web chat service. I asked why the website was signposting separated parents to a charity that was removed from the Charity Commission website in 2013 and from Companies House in 2016. “Leander” said he would pass on my feedback. The farcical transcript of my web chat can be downloaded here.
On 19 September 2017 I wrote to the Child Maintenance Service (in a long string of complaints, see Complaints page):
“Your letter invited me to call Child Maintenance Options to “find out more about making a family-based arrangement. Child Maintenance Options is separated from the Child Maintenance Service. It’s a free, impartial and confidential service. It can help you decide on the best child maintenance arrangement for you and your children and support you in putting it in place.” Child Maintenance Options is not impartial. The telephone script for call handlers was written by Karen and Nick Woodall - virulently misogynistic fathers’ rights activists who believe that women who seek child maintenance are grasping feminist harridans who view fathers only as a source of money. This couple trained Child Maintenance Options staff between 2008 and 2013. They also believe that domestic violence is commonly fabricated by mothers as a vindictive ploy to eradicate fathers from their children’s lives. To claim that Child Maintenance Options is impartial is a lie, and potentially a dangerous one.”
On 18 November 2017 I sent a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Work and Pensions:
My Freedom of Information request was denied on the grounds that it was one of a batch of five FOI requests, which the DWP decided to aggregate for cost purposes. It was decided that the cost of responding to my requests would exceed the cost limit of £600.
On 18 April 2017 the minister responsible for child maintenance at the time, Caroline Nokes, told MPs in a debate on the Child Maintenance Service tabled by MP Marion Fellows:
“The new child maintenance options service acts as a gateway to the scheme, ensuring that parents are given the information and support they need to make an arrangement that is right for them, whether that is a family-based arrangement or a statutory one. Our agents receive specialist training to help them to deal sensitively with clients, and tailored support is delivered via phone, live webchat and email.”
Had she been truthful, she would have told MPs that Child Maintenance Options agents received training from Karen and Nick Woodall of the Centre for Separated Families, fraudsters and fathers’ rights activists, who believed that the Child Support Agency was a “spiteful, faceless bureaucracy” and who were implacably opposed to a statutory child support system.
Karen and Nick Woodall abandoned the Centre for Separated Families in early autumn 2013. It was removed - “ceased to exist” - from the Charity Commission website on 18 December 2013 and legally dissolved as a company on 20 December 2016.
Yet Child Maintenance Options continues to signpost parents to the Centre for Separated Families.
Child Maintenance Options claims to give “expert, impartial advice”. One of the four organisations it signposts people to for legal advice is Wikivorce, which was run for several years by a former senior member of the extremist Fathers 4 Justice, Nick Langford, and his second wife, Ruth Langford, who happened to be close friends of Karen and Nick Woodall.
In 2015 the Department for Work and Pensions re-published a set of eleven Child Maintenance Options leaflets, nine of which signposted separated parents to the Centre for Separated Families. A Freedom of Information request I received in March 2019 reveals that between March 2015 and February 2019 the DWP has spent £250,000 producing these leaflets and accompanying letters. I have sent a further Freedom of Information request, asking how much money has been spent on producing the leaflets since the date that the Centre for Separated Families ceased to exist on the Charity Commission website, plus how much has been spent on postage.
Information for parents with the day-to-day care of their child
Information for parents living apart from their child
Practical support for separating parents
Dealing with your emotions after separation - this leaflet was co-written by Karen and Nick Woodall, and continues to promote their book: “We are grateful to the Centre for Separated Families for their help in writing this guide. We are also grateful to Little Brown Book Group for allowing us to use ideas and information in The Guide for Separated Parents: Putting Your Children First, Karen and Nick Woodall (publisher: Piatkus 2007).”
Getting in contact with your child’s other parent
The Freedom of Information reply above says that the Department for Work and Pensions has spent £250,000 producing these sets of Child Maintenance Options guides since 30 March 2015. I want to know how much they have spent since December 2013, as this is when the Centre for Separated Families officially “ceased to exist” according to the Charity Commission. So I made an educated “guesstimate” (calculations below) that £148,276 was spent producing these leaflets between December 2013 and March 2015. I asked the DWP to confirm whether my guess was fair. I did receive a reply, but no comment was given regarding my “guesstimate”, so I can only assume that they have no objections.
The DWP also told me they could not tell me the postage costs. So I went to the Post Office with an A4 envelope containing a full set of the eleven guides, where I was told that the package weighed 509g.
Royal Mail charges for letters weighing over 500g and under 750g are:
The average cost of posting this set of leaflets over the six year period is £1.63.
234,887 sets of leaflets have been issued since the Centre for Separated Families officially “ceased to exist” on the Charity Commission website.
Therefore we can conclude that the Department for Work and Pensions has wasted around £383,000 on postage.
In total, it appears that the Department for Work and Pensions has wasted around £800,000 producing and posting leaflets containing useless and out of date information. Contrast this to their refusal to spend money on enforcement. It is astonishing how keen the DWP is to help Karen and Woodall promote their book, courtesy of the taxpayer, whom they have already swindled out of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
