Absent fathers fail to pay £2bn in support

Absent fathers owe the crisis-stricken Child Support Agency almost £2bn. The CSA is to write off the debt, which is 30 per cent of the revenue it should collect.

An estimated 200,000 men are dodging maintenance payments, forcing many of their former partners to rely on income support. Nearly a third of single parents are on support.

On top of the £1.92bn collection "black hole", a further £150m is regarded by the service as possibly uncollectable.

The Government admitted yesterday that the agency remained flawed nine years after its launch, but insisted it could be changed.

However, the Liberal Democrats seized on the information contained in the CSA's annual accounts, and demanded the agency's abolition. Steve Webb, the party's Work and Pensions spokesman, said: "It is mind-boggling that uncollected payments of £2bn can be simply written off. It is time for the Government to admit the CSA has been a fiasco from the start and to scrap it.

"The continued failure of the Child Support Agency means that hundreds of thousands of children are not getting the financial support."

He called for responsibility for collection of payments to be switched to Inland Revenue.

The Government has announced plans to streamline the CSA system by making simple maintenance level calculations based on 15 per cent of a parent's income for one child, 20 per cent for two and 25 per cent for three. But this has been held up by problems with a new computer system.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Work and Pensions said: "The figures need to be put in context. The debt has accrued since 1993 when the CSA was formed. We're not claiming in the slightest that the system is anything but flawed – which is why we are reforming it."

David Willetts, the shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, called the failure to collect the £2bn "a scandal".