Maths teacher John Hammond was innocently checking his banking app for his first month's wages at a new school when he discovered that £20,000 had been spirited away by the Child Maintenance Service (CMS). His children, now 25 and 28, had not required child support for over a decade, but the CMS apparently missed that memo.
"I was convinced it was a scam," says the 56-year-old from Peterborough. He was not alone. Over 30 parents told BBC Your Voice they've experienced miscalculated arrears, wrongful wage garnishments, and Kafkaesque legal battles with the CMS, many linked to arrangements concluded years or even decades ago.
The CMS, which replaced the Child Support Agency (CSA) in 2012, is tasked with ensuring parents pay for their children's living costs. It can seize money from wages, bank accounts, benefits, or pensions if voluntary payments fail. But as John Hammond's case illustrates, it sometimes takes money it has no right to take.
Hammond's ordeal began in 2002 when the CSA said he owed £947 but didn't intend to collect it at his ex-wife's request. He assumed the debt was dead. In 2019, the CMS resurrected it, claiming he owed nearly £19,000. Despite his protests, the CMS obtained court orders and in December 2020 deducted £19,269 from his bank account. A year later, a county court judge ordered the full sum returned plus £8,000 in legal costs. Hammond had spent £14,055 on legal fees, leaving him over £6,000 out of pocket. "Even when you're proved right it doesn't feel like justice," he says. "It just feels like you've survived it."
Richard George, 63, a fintech founder from Devon, had £18,800 lifted from his bank by the CMS in 2019. An appeal tribunal had overturned a CSA decision against him in 2016, writing off over £16,000 in arrears. But the CMS apparently didn't get the memo - or sent it to the wrong address for years, despite letters being returned undelivered. It took until 2023 for the CMS to admit the arrears should never have been carried over and return the money, but by then the damage was done.
A House of Lords report in October 2025 called Reforming the Child Maintenance Service found that the CMS's enforcement was "random, abusive and unregulated" and that its calculation formula, unchanged for over two decades, "is neither fair nor transparent" and does not reflect modern family structures. The government has committed to a review, but the CMS currently manages 800,000 arrangements for 720,000 paying parents and claims "assessment accuracy rates are consistently close to 100%." Yet in 2025, the CMS received 92,700 requests to reconsider decisions, and in 21,400 cases the original decision was found incorrect - that's nearly a quarter.
Abigail Wood of Gingerbread, a single-parent charity, says the CMS is "failing parents and children alike." Michelle Counley from the National Association for Child Support Action calls for "serious investment and a joined-up way of working."
John Hammond and Richard George want an overhaul so mistakes stop happening. "Getting the money back didn't feel like a victory," says Hammond. "It was simply the end of a long fight to recover money that CMS had no right to take in the first place."