Commons committee savages CSA reform

The botched reform of the Child Support Agency (CSA) is one of the greatest public administration disasters of recent times, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) says in a new report.

Following the publication of the report, Child Support Agency: Implementation of the Child Support Reforms, Edward Leigh, PAC chairman, says it is hard to think of a body in which the public has less confidence—55,000 complaints were received about the CSA in 2005–06.
He says: “The facts speak for themselves. More than one in three non-resident parents fail to pay any of the money they owe, amounting to £3.5bn in uncollected maintenance. And 275,000 cases are stuck in the system and so going nowhere.”

The CSA threw huge sums of money at a new IT system which was intended to underpin the reforms, he says, with disastrous results.
“The Department for Work and Pensions never really knew what it was doing in dealing with the contractors EDS and the system was a turkey from day one. Three years after it was introduced, it still had 500 defects and staff confidence has been seriously damaged,” he adds.
The Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission will replace the CSA in 2008.