The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has published statistics on the progress of the Child Support Agency (CSA) case-closure programme from June 2014 to December 2015.

As part of the government’s Welfare Reform changes, a new Child Maintenance Service (CMS) was introduced to administer all child maintenance under the same rules. In June 2014, the DWP started telling CSA clients that their CSA case will close.

Cases in the previous 1993 and 2003 child maintenance schemes administered by the CSA will all be closed by 31 December 2017 and clients are being invited to consider making their own family-based arrangements or to apply to the CMS.

Before case closure began, there were 852,000 cases with a CSA liability due to be closed. Over half of all relevant cases have now started the case-closure process and 279,000 of these have had their CSA liability ended. Of these closed cases, 13% have now applied to the CMS.

As of December 2015, the overall CSA caseload has decreased from 1.5 million to 1.3 million.

Click here to read the full report.