NEARLY 40 per cent of the parents who have their child maintenance payments controlled by the government in Ceredigion failed to pay in the first three months of 2018.

New figures from the Department for Work and Pensions show that 100 parents were due to pay support through the Child Maintenance Service in Ceredigion, but about 40 did not pay.

Numbers provided by the government are rounded to the nearest 10, but the DWP says that 37.6 per cent failed to make their payments between January and March this year.

The proportion of parents failing to pay in Ceredigion is down from 40.4 per cent over the last quarter of 2017.

At the start of this year, the best performance was in the Shetland Islands, Scotland, where only 24.1 per cent of parents failed to pay. The poorest record was in Rutland, East Midlands, where 55.3 per cent of parents did not meet their obligations to their children.

This payment service, called Collect and Pay, is part of the Child Maintenance Service, which was set up in 2012 to replace the Child Support Agency. The Child Maintenance Service can calculate the amount of child support to be paid and parents can arrange the payments between themselves - a mechanism called Direct Pay.

In Ceredigion, 210 parents made Direct Pay arrangements over the first three months of 2018.

But in the cases where parents cannot do this or there is a disagreement about payment, the Collect and Pay service can collect and manage the payments between the parents.

The CMS can take money from a parent’s earnings or their bank account if they try to avoid payments, or take a parent to court.

Over the three-months to March 2018, about 300 paying parents in the council required the intervention of the Child Maintenance Service.

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