Rejected petition Reform Child Maintenance Service enforcement to prevent repeated non-payment

At present, parents who fail to pay through Direct Pay can be moved onto a Deduction from Earnings Order (DEO), but can default back to DP even with a history of non-payment. Enabling repeated defaulting, leaving children and resident parents without financial support for upto 3 months at a time.

More details

Ensure once a DEO is in place it remains until arrears are cleared and a consistent record of payment is established.
Prevent non-paying parents from defaulting to DP.
Strengthen penalties for persistent non-payment.
Enforcing maintenance obligations consistently and promptly, will protect children from financial harm.
Children are disadvantaged because the system allows repeated non-payment.
Close the loopholes and ensure maintenance obligations are enforced effectively.

This petition was rejected

Why was this petition rejected?

There’s already a petition about this issue. We cannot accept a new petition when we already have one about a very similar issue.

You are more likely to get action on this issue if you sign and share a single petition.

The following petition calls for a similar action:

Take stronger measures to enforce payment of child maintenance arrears.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/739525

We only reject petitions that don’t meet the petition standards.

Date submitted 1 October 2025
Get petition data (json format)

About petition data

The data shows the number of people who have signed the petition by country as well as in the constituency of each Member of Parliament. This data is available for all petitions on the site. It is not a list of people who have signed the petition. The only name that is shared on the site is that of the petition creator.