BBC News Online: UK

Child Support Agency owed £1bn

Some parents wait years for their CSA assessments

Uncollected child maintenance by the government agency now stands at more than £500m.

And a further £500m has already been written off by the agency as "probably" uncollectable.

He also found that a third of the calculations by the CSA last year contained mistakes.

And 47,000 parents had been waiting for more than a year for their first assessment.

Professor Webb said children were being let down by the government, and urged it to scrap the CSA.

He said: "The continued failure of the CSA means that hundreds of thousands of children are not getting the financial support that is theirs by right.

"It is mind-boggling that uncollected maintenance payments can exceed half a billion pounds and that people are having to wait a year for an initial assessment."

'Radical reform'

Professor Webb continued: "Performance targets that are not met get scrapped, and the suffering of families goes on.

"It is time for the government to admit that the CSA has been a fiasco from the start and to scrap it."

But the government has already rejected scrapping the agency, in favour of what it described as "radical reform".

Ministers believe a new simplified "flat rate" calculation for maintenance, to be introduced for new cases next year, will solve the problem.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Work and Pensions said the new system would leave CSA staff spending less time assessing payments and more time chasing them up.