Men don’t pay and won’t pay. Governments for more than 30 years have failed abysmally to make fathers pay for their children. The latest report, following a long line of them, shows how few fathers are paying maintenance, and how many separated mothers are giving up in despair. Child poverty has risen to 44% in single-parent households, but when children do receive maintenance it cuts the child poverty rate by 25%. Why does the state fail to collect on children’s behalf?

The long and sorry saga of the Child Support Agency began in 1993. It was disastrously mismanaged from the start, arousing maximum rage with rebellious fathers’ protests for minimum actual collection of cash. When it was shut down, billions in arrears owed to mothers and children were simply wiped clean, never collected. The Child Maintenance Service (CMS) that replaced it has done no better. This week’s report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Gingerbread, the single parents’ charity, finds 41% of parents caring for children (almost all women) have no maintenance agreement at all from non-resident parents (almost all fathers). They have been failed by the CMS.

Parliament passes ever more legislation and regulation designed to make fathers pay, but this has been gesture politics, performative indignation that shows how little effect any law has without effective enforcement. I wrote about this two years ago, and in that time things have only got worse. The CMS has magnificently draconian powers on paper. If a father fails to pay the sum assessed, the CMS can take payments directly from his salary or his bank account. It can remove his........

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