Almost every time ministers speak publicly about child maintenance, they emphasise that the majority of separated and divorced fathers do pay child maintenance. Sadly, it’s not true.

But the child maintenance reforms have systematically set things up so that ministers can claim that most fathers pay child maintenance.

All Child Support Agency cases are now closed. That is 1.2 million CSA cases in 2011 now closed. The vast majority of these did not go on to apply to the replacement Child Maintenance Service. The Department for Work and Pensions lied to the National Audit Office that it anticipated over 60% of mothers to reapply to the CMS when their CSA cases closed. Only 16% have done so. In fact, DWP Research Report 503, which ministers used to falsely claim that more than half of separated parents with the CSA really wanted to make family based arrangements, had found that if a £100 fee were to be charged to use the statutory system, only 4% of CSA mothers would reapply. And that is the figure at which the application fee was originally proposed. Deliberately, to deter most mothers from reapplying.

DWP’s own research shows that, three months after case closure, very few mothers have a family based arrangement in place. Yet the DWP classifies any family without a statutory case as having a successful family based arrangement.

Next, for the small minority of separated mothers who do reapply to the Child Maintenance Service, they are not allowed onto its “Collect and Pay service” unless and until they have proved that fathers are unwilling or unlikely to pay. As the system is deliberately designed to wear mothers down and make them feel bad about using the statutory system - if they do, they are not putting their children first, according to ministers - and make them acquiesce to any sporadic, inadequate or non-existent financial contributions — we have no reliable way of ascertaining what proportion of mothers on “Direct Pay” are receiving payments in full and on time or even at all. The DWP classifies all “Direct Pay” cases as fully compliant and claims credit for all money theoretically transferred privately between separated parents.

And for those on the laughably named “Collect and Pay service”, the DWP claims that fathers are “compliant” if they make any payment at all within a three month period. That means as little as one penny for any number of children.

The myth that most fathers want to pay child support was promoted to the intellectually limited and dishonest Maria Miller by fraudsters Karen and Nick Woodall and their longtime collaborator, Christine Skinner of York University.

The myth was given academic weight by Jonathan Bradshaw, Emeritus Professor at York University, who has worked with Christine Skinner since the 1990s.

By a curious quirk of fate, Jonathan Bradshaw is the older brother of Labour MP, Ben Bradshaw, who described CARE as "a bunch of homophobic bigots” after Charles Colchester withdrew CARE’s offer of a free parliamentary intern on discovering that he was gay.

Almost from the inception of the Child Support Agency in 1993, Jonathan Bradshaw and Christine Skinner have undermined its aims, providing convoluted justifications for fathers’ failure to pay.

In 2007 they provided written evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee arguing that many fathers could not afford to pay child maintenance.

In this blog post on 26 January 2012, Karen Woodall argues with a rare contributor who dares to disagree with her version of reality:

“Richard, we are not going to agree, you are fixed in your view and are concentrating upon a small group of people, those who are left holding the baby. Out of the 2.5 or so million separated parents, that comes to a fraction of the whole. Policy has been built upon that fraction for too many years, causing untold pain and suffering to too many. The views on here are not biased, they are born of real life suffering and the experience of being discriminated against. I work with both sides of the family, I was left holding the baby, literally, but I understand how the biased legislation pushes fathers out of their children’s lives. If you want to argue about the rights and wrongs of outdated legislation, here is not the place to do it, our work at the Centre for Separated Families has gone way beyond that and we a working for a better future for all of our children, not just those in a small group of families. I understand your view and I fundamentally disagree with it, however you are entitled to it and I would fight for your right to express it, just not on here!”

Clip of Nick Langford at International Conference for Men quoting Jonathan Bradshaw’s 1999 book, “Absent Fathers?”, in which he claimed that fathers want to pay for their children.

Perhaps we have to consider the unhappy possibility that, actually, a lot of these men aren’t very nice, and that the personality traits which now manifest themselves in a refusal to pay child maintenance, or in using child maintenance as a form of ongoing control over mothers, are probably the same personality traits which led to the relationship breakdown itself. Refusal to pay child maintenance is a form of domestic abuse.

DWP Research Report 405, Child support policy: An international perspective by Jonathan Bradshaw, Christine Skinner and Jacqueline Davidson of York University:

“found that the proportion of non-widowed, female-headed families receiving child maintenance in the UK had fallen from 39.2 per cent in 1979 to 21.2 per cent in 1995”.

In 2003 Australian academic Michael Flood wrote, in “Fatherhood and Fatherlessness:

“Large numbers of non-resident fathers do not provide adequate economic support for their children after a divorce. A national survey of Australian child support clients in 2000 found that only 28 per cent of payees reported always receiving payments on time, 40 per cent of payees reported that payment was never received, and 21 per cent of payers reported that they never paid child support. It is important to note that there are significant reporting differences in relation to child support payments. According to both Australian and overseas research, payers appear to greatly over-estimate their compliance with child support, while resident parents appear to slightly under-estimate actual payments.`’

In 2006 John Ermisch and Chiara Pronzato of the University of Essex commented, in Intra-Household Allocation of Resources: Inferences from Non-Resident Fathers’ Child Support Payments:

“The majority of child support arrangements are made informally, and while courts and the Child Support Agency (CSA) can set and order payment, they do not enforce orders very well. With either the lack of institutional sanctions, or weak enforcement (a small or zero cost of non-compliance), child support payments are essentially voluntary for most fathers.”

In 2014 the European Parliament published “Child maintenance systems in EU states from a gender perspective”.

“Back in 1994, only 43% of European single parents received child maintenance payments. In 2000, the figure was still less than 50%, but by 20042, the proportion of single parents receiving child maintenance had increased to 64%. This rise in payment rates could be linked to the introduction of legal processes to enforce the payment of child maintenance.”

On 30 October 2018 Baroness Buscombe told Peers legislating on writing off Child Support Agency arrears that:

“These draft regulations will strengthen the statutory scheme and introduce measures to prevent parents artificially minimising their child maintenance liability. They will also introduce new collection measures, close loopholes and broaden the sanctions that we can bring against the small number of parents who persistently fail to meet their obligations to their children.”

On 12 November 2018 Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Justin Tomlinson, told MPs legislating on writing off Child Support Agency arrears that:

“The draft regulations address a number of those issues by closing known loopholes, updating the way in which child maintenance is calculated and introducing a new sanction to target the small minority of parents who persistently evade their responsibilities.”

Later in the debate, Justin Tomlinson said:

“It is disappointing that the Opposition do not support the regulations because they send a crystal-clear message to that tiny minority of parents who are choosing to avoid their responsibilities.”

Mr Tomlinson seems to have a difficulty with basic maths (or perhaps basic honesty). On the ironically named “Collect and Pay service”, just 57% of child support liability had been collected over the previous two years. A Freedom of Information request I received in February 2019 states that during the quarter ending September 2018 just 16% of so-called “paying parents” paid their full liability plus their 20% collection fee. 37% paid nothing at all, while 47% paid less than their full liability. So, 84% of “paying parents” on “Collect and Pay” paid less than their liability or nothing at all. That is the vast majority not a tiny minority!

What he more accurately could have said was:

“The regulations send a crystal-clear message to that vast majority of parents who choose to avoid their responsibilities that evasion is infinitesimally likely to invoke sanctions and will be rewarded by having their arrears written off.”

Child Maintenance Options continues to peddle the myth that most fathers do pay child support for their children. In its series of advice leaflets, it falsely claims, “Most of the 2.5 million separated families in Great Britain have an arrangement in place where both parents contribute financially.” The purpose of this false optimism is to persuade mothers that they should try to make “family based arrangements” and that if they fail to persuade fathers to contribute, they are abnormal and in the minority.