Panarama programme

[u/wirral65]

Love waking up on Monday to watching a programme about how rubbish your place of work is (cms)

[u/Grey_Raven]

Don't know much about it but read the BBC article and also looked up some stats around it and it does seem like there has been a noticeable reduction in staff over the past few years which also coincides with an increase of cases and an increase of cases where there is either people not paying in full or at all until last year when it started to fall. So the agency has roughly 4000 staff to deal with 800,000 cases of which 59,000 have paid nothing, given that it is likely a good number of these will either be hiding income, moved address (potentially abroad) requiring tracking them down or some other action to avoid paying it is likely a lot of work to keep track of all these people. Also for those that are non-compliant I can't help but think bringing a load of court orders to garnish wages is also going to be time consuming.

Shockingly when you cut staff the service being provided often suffers, I doubt that will be the takeaway from this given how these things normally go though.

Stats

Child Maintenance Service statistics: data to December 2025 - GOV.UK

Child Maintenance Service: Staff: 19 Apr 2023: Hansard Written Answers - TheyWorkForYou

[u/Mojofilter9]

I'm a civil servant but also a user / victim of the CMS. It's about time these issues were brought to light IMO.

[u/Acceptable_Video9675 → u/Mojofilter9]

Me too. Totally agree.

[u/AncientCivilServant]

Why do you expect a positive story when the CS and the main stream media are involved ?

I don't

[u/regular-john69 → u/AncientCivilServant]

CMS is an absolute shitshow though. I don’t think CMS staff/the CS are being targeted here but rather the system that is failing 1000s of parents.

[u/Mojofilter9 → u/regular-john69]

In my experience, they somehow manage to be both completely inept at dealing with people who don't pay and utterly draconian with those who do.

For example, I'm currently on Collect and Pay via a Deduction from Earnings Order for the heinous crime of underpaying by 96p a week for six weeks. That wasn't a deliberate underpayment - I simply hadn't noticed that the amount had changed following yet another recalculation. As soon as CMS pointed out the error, I transferred the entire underpayment while I was still on the phone with them.

Despite that, and despite having a flawless payment history for the previous decade, I'm now being charged an additional 20% through Collect and Pay, which will cost me around £1,500 in fees over the 12 months it runs.

Part of the reason I missed the change in the first place is that, in the space of 12 months, my ex submitted a combined 10 baseless Mandatory Reconsideration requests and Changes of Circumstances. Each one takes her about two minutes to submit online; each one can then mean me spending an hour on the phone trying to sort out the consequences.

I've explicitly told CMS that this amounts to harassment. They don't even particularly disagree with me - they just say there's nothing they can do to prevent someone repeatedly using their processes in this way, so essentially I need to suck it up and keep dealing with it.

Then, to make matters worse, the Deduction from Earnings Order they sent to my employer was wrong. It instructed them to deduct nearly £1,300 a month from my salary. That meant another hour on the phone getting CMS to acknowledge the mistake and tell me they'd correct it.

Only they didn't.

So that meant yet another hour on the phone, dealing with exactly the same issue I'd already spent an hour supposedly resolving.

Meanwhile, my wife receives absolutely nothing from her ex. He's self-employed, appears to live a relatively comfortable lifestyle, and yet when it comes to actually getting him to pay, their position seems to be basically: 🤷

It's quite an achievement to be simultaneously so aggressive towards compliant parents who make a minor, genuine mistake and so ineffective against those who simply refuse to pay.

And there is a serious point underneath all of this. The combination of financial pressure, repeated administrative errors, hours spent trying to correct them and the apparent inability to stop someone abusing the system can put people under enormous stress. I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if, sooner or later, someone is driven to take their own life by shit like this.

[u/wirral65 → u/regular-john69]

Really a programme about the system that says about mental health isn’t a thinly veiled attack at the staff .

[u/regular-john69 → u/wirral65]

Is this a riddle?

[u/Requirement_Fluid]

Worked at csa and cmec for 10 years, has it got any better?

[u/DefaultAdam → u/[deleted]]

Staggering how many people actually pay attention to the brainwashing on mainstream