When something goes seriously wrong for a person dealing with a government department, most people assume somebody looks into it. For the Child Maintenance Service, the answer is: only if someone asks. This article sets out what the DWP's review process is, what it produced in 2025, and what a family, an adviser or an MP can do to make sure a case is examined.
What an Internal Process Review is
The DWP's mechanism is the Internal Process Review, or IPR. In a Freedom of Information response dated 20 February 2026 (FOI2026/06949), the department described it like this: "Where there is a suggestion or allegation that DWP's actions or omissions have negatively impacted a customer and they have suffered serious harm or death, DWP undertakes Internal Process Reviews. These reviews are conducted independently of DWP's service lines."
Two features of that definition matter. The trigger is a suggestion or allegation. A death on its own, even a death during active enforcement, does not start a review; somebody has to raise the possibility that the department contributed. And the reviews are internal. They are carried out by the DWP's Advanced Customer Support function, independent of the CMS as a service line but inside the department, and their findings are not routinely published case by case.
What 2025 produced
The FOI request asked, for the calendar year 2025, how many reviews involved a reported suicide, a reported attempted suicide or a recorded serious mental health crisis where the CMS was the primary service line. The DWP's answer: one completed review. It added that in that case "enforcement action was not active at the time of this person's passing".
For context, the DWP's own FOI data shows that around a thousand paying parents recorded as in arrears die each year, from all causes. We set that data out in full in over 6,300 paying parents died while in CMS arrears. Nobody suggests a thousand reviews a year are warranted. But the distance between the number of deaths the CMS knows about and the number of reviews it carries out is a measure of how much depends on someone outside the department raising the alarm.
The vulnerability pause
The same response contains a sentence every paying parent under pressure should know: "Where customers present as vulnerable, enforcement action may be paused or cancelled depending on individual circumstances."
That is a real lever, and it only works if the CMS knows. If you or someone you are supporting is struggling with their mental health while a CMS case runs, tell the CMS in writing, describe the situation plainly, and ask specifically for enforcement to be paused while the underlying issue is dealt with. Keep a copy. If the CMS continues to escalate after being told, that is precisely the kind of "action or omission" an Internal Process Review exists to examine.
How to make sure a case is reviewed
If a family member has died, or come to serious harm, and you believe the CMS's handling of their case played a part, these are the routes that put the case in front of someone with the power to look.
- Make a formal complaint to the CMS stating explicitly that you believe the department's actions or omissions contributed to serious harm or death, and asking for an Internal Process Review. Use those words. Our complaints letter generator will structure it, and the evidence checklist approach, contemporaneous records and dated correspondence, applies here as much as anywhere.
- Escalate to the Independent Case Examiner if the CMS response does not address the substance.
- Write to the MP. An MP's letter to a DWP minister asking whether an IPR has been carried out is answered, and it creates a record that a question was asked.
- Where there is an inquest, tell the coroner about the CMS involvement. Coroners can issue a Prevention of Future Deaths report to any organisation whose actions they believe risk further deaths, including government departments, and such a report must be answered publicly. It is the one external mechanism that can compel the DWP to explain itself on the record.
What we would like to see change
We put these as questions in the companion article and we will not repeat the argument here, except to say that a review process triggered only by allegation will always under-count harm, because the people best placed to raise an allegation are grieving. A death during active enforcement is a fact the CMS holds in its own system. Using that fact as an automatic trigger would cost little and would tell the department things it currently learns only by accident. Whether the reform programme addresses any of this is something we will track.