Yes. A magistrates' court can send a paying parent to prison for unpaid child maintenance. The power is real, it has been used, and it has never been repealed.
Now the part that rarely gets said. The DWP confirmed zero imprisonments under the Child Maintenance Service in 2015, 2016 and 2017, and it has published no statistics at all on its use of this power since the CMS launched in 2012. The realistic risk for almost every parent in arrears is not a cell. It is a suspended term hanging over them while they pay.
This article sets out the law, the numbers, and the one genuinely unresolved question about what happens to your arrears if you do serve the time.
Where the power comes from
Committal to prison for child maintenance arrears sits in section 40 of the Child Support Act 1991. It is a civil power, not a criminal one, and the court cannot touch it until a liability order has already been made.
Section 40(3) is the test, and it is a high one. The court may act "if, but only if, the court is of the opinion that there has been wilful refusal or culpable neglect on the part of the liable person".
Two words carry the whole thing. Wilful means you could have paid and chose not to. Culpable means the failure was your own fault. A parent who genuinely could not pay has done neither. Poverty is a defence. Hiding income is not.
If the court is not satisfied of wilful refusal or culpable neglect, it has no jurisdiction to commit at all. That single sentence is the reason the numbers are as low as they are.
Six weeks is the ceiling
Section 40(7) caps the period at six weeks. Nothing longer is available under this section, no matter how large the arrears or how long they have been outstanding. A parent owing £3,000 and a parent owing £60,000 face the same statutory maximum.
Section 40(4) requires the warrant to be made out for the amount outstanding plus an amount for the costs of the committal proceedings, and the warrant must state that total figure on its face.
Section 40(6) then does something people find surprising. The warrant orders imprisonment for the specified period "but to be released (unless he is in custody for some other reason) on payment of the amount stated in the warrant". Pay the figure on the warrant and you walk out. Section 40(8) allows regulations to reduce the period where part of the amount has been paid.
The suspended sentence is the realistic outcome
Section 40(3) gives the court two options once it finds wilful refusal or culpable neglect. It can issue a warrant of commitment. Or it can fix a term and postpone it on such conditions as the court thinks just, usually a payment schedule.
The second option is what almost always happens, and the historic figures show it clearly.
| Period | Imprisoned | Suspended sentences |
|---|---|---|
| 2007-08 (CSA) | 25 | 480 |
| First half of 2010-11 (CSA) | 35 | Not separately stated |
| 2010-11 full year (CSA, approximate) | Around 50 | Around 900 |
| 2011-12 (CSA) | 75 committal orders in total, roughly 0.01% of the CSA caseload | |
| 2015 to 2017 (CMS) | 0 | Not published |
| 2012 to date (CMS) | No statistics published by the DWP | |
Read the 2007-08 row again. For every one parent actually imprisoned, roughly nineteen received a suspended term. In 2010-11 the ratio was about eighteen to one. The court's default is to fix the term, hang it over the parent, and let the payment schedule do the work.
A suspended committal is still serious. Breach the conditions and the court can activate the term without rerunning the whole case. But it is a very different thing from being taken into custody at the hearing, and it is the outcome the overwhelming majority of committal applications produce.
How often it actually happens now
Here is the honest position. Nobody outside the DWP knows.
The old Child Support Agency published committal figures. The CMS, which replaced it from 2012, has not published statistics on its use of section 40 since the service launched. Estimates put all court sanctions combined, meaning committal, driving disqualification and passport removal together, at roughly 20 a year. Split three ways, that leaves each individual sanction in low single or double digits.
Set that against the scale of the caseload. DWP official statistics with data to March 2026 show £791.2 million of unpaid maintenance accumulated since 2012, about 7% of everything that has fallen due in that period, across 810,000 arrangements.
Committal is the last rung, not the first
The CMS has a sequence, and section 40 sits at the very end of it. Before a court can even consider prison, the CMS has to have obtained a liability order, which is the judicial confirmation that the debt is owed and enforceable.
The DWP's enforcement figures show what the pipeline actually looks like. At the end of March 2026 there were 5,300 liability orders, 5,400 deduction orders and 7,200 enforcement agent referrals in process. Thousands of parents are somewhere in the enforcement machinery. Almost none of them reach a committal hearing.
We have set out the full sequence, from missed payment to deduction from earnings to bailiffs, in what happens if you do not pay child maintenance.
Passports and driving licences: the alternatives the court weighs
Section 39A of the Act lets the Secretary of State make representations to the court about whether it is more appropriate to commit the parent to prison or to disqualify them from holding a driving licence. The two are presented as alternatives, and the court chooses.
Sections 39B to 39G add a further option: an application to disqualify a non-resident parent from holding or obtaining a UK passport for up to two years, again where there has been wilful refusal.
In practice this means a committal hearing is often a hearing about which sanction to impose rather than whether to imprison. A parent who needs their licence for work may find the passport route applied instead, or the other way round.
It is not a criminal offence
Failing to pay child maintenance is not a crime in England and Wales. There is no offence to be convicted of, and committal under section 40 does not give you a criminal record. It is a civil enforcement measure taken to compel payment of a civil debt.
That distinction has practical consequences. It does not appear on a standard DBS check as a conviction. It is not a sentence in the criminal sense. And the release provision in section 40(6) means the "sentence" ends the moment the stated amount is paid, which is not how criminal sentences work.
Does serving the time wipe the arrears?
This is the question parents ask most, and the honest answer is that it is no longer settled.
Section 94 of the Magistrates' Courts Act 1980 was headed "Effect of committal on arrears". It was omitted on 22 April 2014 by the Crime and Courts Act 2013. Whatever comfort that provision offered, it is not available to rely on now.
The Child Support Act 1991 itself contains no provision saying that serving the term extinguishes the debt. There is no clause in section 40 to that effect, and none elsewhere in the Act.
So the position is this. The statute does not wipe the arrears, and the old provision that dealt with the point has been repealed. We are not going to tell you the debt definitely survives, and we are not going to tell you it definitely disappears. Anyone facing committal should take advice on this specific point rather than assume either answer.
What is clear is that child maintenance arrears themselves have no limitation period. An old debt does not expire because time has passed.
Scotland is different
Section 40(12) says it in one line: "This section does not apply to Scotland." Scottish cases are handled separately under section 40A, and the procedure and the court are not the same. If your case is in Scotland, do not read section 40 as describing your position.
If you receive a committal summons
- Go to the hearing. Not attending removes your only chance to show that the failure was not wilful and not culpable. The section 40(3) test is the entire battleground.
- Get representation. Committal proceedings engage your liberty. Legal aid may be available. Contact a solicitor, Citizens Advice or a law centre before the date, not on the morning.
- Bring the evidence. Bank statements, wage slips, benefit award letters, medical evidence, anything that shows what you actually had coming in during the period the arrears built up.
- Check the figure. Committal proceedings are not the place to argue the calculation was wrong, but a wrong figure should have been challenged earlier. Our arrears calculator helps you work out what should have accrued, and the maintenance calculator shows what the formula produces on your income.
- Propose something realistic. The court's preferred outcome is a postponed term with conditions. Turning up with a payment offer you can actually meet is the single most useful thing most parents can do.
The wider picture
Most parents in arrears are not looking at prison. They are looking at deductions from earnings, deductions from bank accounts, and enforcement agents. The DWP's quarterly figures to March 2026 show that of 240,000 paying parents on Collect and Pay, 77% (190,000) paid something and 23% (57,000) paid nothing. Of those who paid, 54% (130,000) paid over 90% of what was due.
If the underlying calculation is what is wrong, fix that first. A mandatory reconsideration is the only route to changing a figure, and there is a one month deadline. If the problem is how your case has been handled, a formal complaint is the starting point, and it is worth understanding who actually runs the CMS before you write it. If you want to understand how the figure was produced in the first place, start with how child maintenance is calculated.
The answer to the question in the title is yes, legally, under section 40 of the Child Support Act 1991, for up to six weeks, where a court finds wilful refusal or culpable neglect. The answer in practice is that it happens to a handful of people a year at most, that a suspended term is the far likelier outcome, and that the DWP has not published the figures that would let you check.