A military veteran with cancer has been given an 11th-hour reprieve after a judge overturned a liability order from the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) which gave them power to seize and sell his home.
Despite evidence from Mark Pryce, 62, that he could not work for the past two years since a cancer diagnosis in 2021, the CMS continued to demand payments toward child maintenance at the same rate as before his illness.
Following the pursuit of a liability order in December for the sale of Mr. Pryce’s house, the CMS planned on evicting the veteran on Wednesday.
But on Tuesday at Bournemouth Courts of Justice, District Judge Lindsay Powell staved off the eviction by at least three months to help Mr. Pryce back on an affordable payment plan.
Mr. Pryce, who has two children in his care at home, told The Epoch Times: “I received a notice of eviction before Christmas. I couldn’t look at my children because I kept thinking, ‘We’re gonna be on the streets.’ That stress, along with undergoing cancer treatment, has disrupted my life so much.”
‘I’d Have Been on the Streets’
Mr. Pryce, who is also providing toward the upkeep of his daughter from an estranged former partner via the CMS, said: “The [CMS] just want the money. And 90 percent of the time, it’s not even accurate. So they’re chasing something for somebody they don’t even know. Had they been successful, I'd have been out on the streets now.”The CMS, which sits in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), is responsible for ensuring financial support for children when parents live apart. It calculates and manages child maintenance payments and has gained notoriety in recent years due to concerns over its effectiveness in assessing paying parents and assisting children’s primary carers in receiving funds.
The CMS holds enhanced enforcement powers with the ability to request court-issued liability orders in England and Wales, including the deployment of bailiffs, asset sales, and the potential withholding of a passport, driver’s licence, seizing of property or imprisonment.
In Scotland, a sheriff can impose a payment charge or freeze assets.
During the hearing on Tuesday, Judge Powell said Mr. Pryce, a carpenter by trade, had “been brutally honest.”
The judge said if Mr. Pryce could, he would pay, adding, “He did it for two years.”
According to the CMS’s paperwork, Mr. Pryce was labelled as “unreliable,” but Judge Powell disagreed, asserting that the evidence presented did not support such a judgment. She also highlighted the fact that there was clear confusion over the sums owed, although it was not within that court’s jurisdiction to scrutinise this.
Mr. Pryce, who is battling prostate cancer, contends that the original sums demanded from him by the CMS were incorrect, detailing that the CMS were demanding payments from him far greater than what he should owe based on income, due to the department’s use of an old tax return, from when Mr. Pryce had earned a far larger amount than in recent years.
The original assessment was made by the CMS’s forerunner, the now-defunct Child Support Agency (CSA) in 2009, based on a 2007 tax return of Mr. Pryce’s income, which not only predates the birth of his first child, but also saw him as the director of a limited company that was no longer trading at the time of the assessment.
Mr. Pryce has earned less than half of the salary he was on in 2007, ever since.
Despite challenging this figure, Mr. Pryce continued to pay the rate demanded, believing that he had whittled the original arrears assessment down to around £4,500 last year.
The CMS once again inflated this figure to around £9,000 by the time of the court hearing, also claiming that Mr. Pryce owed unsubstantiated “interest,” without explanation as to how this had accrued.
The Epoch Times saw substantial evidence in the form of email exchanges and tax returns, showing that the CMS had appeared to not take into account Mr. Pryce’s recent tax returns, or medical records and instead based their current calculations off a historical, far higher level of income.
Under the Child Maintenance Support Act 1991, section 33(4), the power of making a calculation falls purely in the power of the CMS. The legislation states, “The sheriff shall not question the maintenance calculation under which the payments of child support maintenance fell to be made.”
Several senior politicians have questioned this power, with chief Labour whip Sir Alan Campbell calling last April for a full public inquiry into the CMS’s assessment process.
Toll on Mental Health
Mr. Pryce, who served in the Corps of Royal Engineers between 1978-1990 and served to keep the peace during the Falklands War, shared how the battle over the debt has taken a toll on his mental health.Mr. Pryce said: “A few weeks ago, a few months ago, there was a school teacher who took her own life because of a negative report in the school. Measures and steps have been taken to adjust how the reports are done in future to protect others. So why not for the CMS? There’s no support for those who’ve taken their own lives due to the stress caused by CMS actions.”
Noel Willcox, a political candidate for Reform UK and a long-time campaigner for the rights of mistreated paying parents, told The Epoch Times via text, “The fact that the CMS tried to force the sale of a house of a man who was not earning or working due to being treated for cancer, who has served his country and, as it appears, has consistently paid for his children, as well as try to correct the CMS’s miscalculations as they pursue him, tells you everything about the inhumane way they operate.”
Mr. Willcox added, “It’s cruel, immoral and a disgrace.”
Concerning Mortality Rate
According to data obtained via multiple Freedom of Information Requests, figures on the mortality of paying parents from sources including the CMS itself, the DWP, and the Office for National Statistics reveal a concerning pattern among those in arrears with the CMS.The data indicates that parents in arrears have a mortality rate a staggering 14.28 times higher than the national average, constituting a profoundly elevated risk of death among paying parents. This group constitutes a significant 65.1 percent of all deaths within this demographic, despite representing only 12.3 percent of the total population.
An overwhelming 93.1 percent of deaths surpassing the national mortality rate (referred to as excess or unexplained deaths) among paying parents occurred in individuals who were in arrears in the month leading up to their passing.
According to many paying parents whom The Epoch Times have spoken to, this data trend may well illustrate the severe mental impact of CMS arrears collection.
