British Government Proposes Curfews and Electronic Tags for Parents Who Fail to Pay Child Maintenance

An ankle monitor in a file photograph. (Loren Elliott/AFP via Getty Images)

Parents who don’t pay any child maintenance fees will be tagged and surveilled ahead of a jail sentence, under new planning powers at the Child Maintenance Service (CMS).

The curfew orders plans announced on Saturday would be another method of enforcement, alongside current powers which include passport and driving license confiscation and earnings deduction orders, to tackle parents who continually refuse to pay maintenance owed, the government said.

It added that child support payments help lift around 140,000 children out of poverty each year.

As an alternative sanction to prison, the CMS, which is part of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), said that it is proposing curfews that would be monitored by an electronic tag with an electronic monitoring service.

If parents fail to comply, the CMS would be able refer them back to court which might then extend the curfew order or impose a prison sentence.

Parents in the UK legally have to support their children financially. If a couple separated, one parent will have to pay child maintenance to the other. This can be arranged privately, but CMS can get involved if there is a dispute.

Last year, the single-family charity Gingerbread reported that £408.3 million in arrears was now owed to children across Great Britain.

The government said that curfews would act as a deterrent by restricting and disrupting non-compliant parents’ lifestyles, stopping them, for example, from going out for dinner, to the pub, or going on holiday.

This announcement builds on new powers introduced in March to digitise all communications to parents and improvements to help the service trace the paying parent, calculate maintenance, and enforce arrears more effectively.

This will expand the list of companies and organisations required to provide information to CMS.

DWP Lords Minister Baroness Stedman-Scott said that for children in low-income households, maintenance payments can “make all the difference, lifting them out of poverty.”

“We are not afraid to go after those parents who deliberately and repeatedly refuse to pay for their children. Curfew orders are another step towards providing the CMS with a full arsenal of powers to make sure children get the financial support they need to have the best start in life,” said Stedman-Scott.

In an open consultation, the DWP said that it anticipated the number of cases where it would use this enforcement power “would be very low.”

“Based on the number of applications to remove passports, we expect that we would have less than 10 cases per year,” it added.