Over 6,300 Paying Parents Died While in CMS Arrears. Nobody Recorded Why

The DWP counted paying parents who died while using the CMS and who were recorded as in arrears at the end of the month before their death. Across the two responses:

• September 2017 to December 2021: 4,290 deaths, of which 3,990 were men, 220 women, and 80 of unrecorded gender.
• December 2021 to December 2023: 2,080 deaths, of which 1,900 were men, 130 women, and 50 unrecorded.
• Combined, allowing for the overlapping month: a little over 6,300 deaths across six years and four months, or roughly 85 to 90 a month once the reporting lag is accounted for. Around 93% were men, which reflects who paying parents are: the caseload in arrears was between 92% and 94% male throughout.

The monthly figure is strikingly steady. Most months sit between 80 and 100. The exception is April 2020, the first full month of the pandemic, when it reached 130, and the months either side, which is consistent with what happened to deaths across the whole population that spring.

The arrears caseload these deaths occurred within moved a great deal more. Paying parents recorded as in arrears peaked at almost 318,000 in December 2018, fell to about 218,000 during 2021, and had climbed back to 252,000 by November 2023. The number of deaths did not track those swings closely, which is itself worth noticing.

What the data cannot tell you, in the DWP's own words

The 2022 response is unusually direct about the limits of what was released: "Although date of death is held, the cause of death is not, therefore no causal effect or link between a CMS case in arrears and mortality can be assumed from any information provided. A number of possible factors may contribute to mortality, such as age, sex, health and income."

That is right, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. This is not a count of suicides. It is a count of every death, from every cause, of every paying parent who happened to have an arrears balance on the CMS system, including balances inherited from the old CSA. Some of those parents were elderly. Some had been ill for years. Being "in arrears" on the CMS system also covers a great deal more than refusing to pay: a disputed calculation, an employer slow to action a deduction order, or a case still being corrected can all leave a balance showing. The figures measure money the system had not yet collected, not the character of the person who died.

Three further caveats from the responses. Everything is rounded to the nearest ten. The figures are management information, not official statistics. And the last few months of each extract are undercounted because deaths reach the CMS late: December 2021 was reported as 10 deaths in 2022 and revised to 90 two years later, which is why the chart shades the tail as a reporting lag.

Why anyone asked

People do not send FOI requests about mortality out of idle curiosity. Over the last decade, national newspapers, MPs and campaigners have raised cases of paying parents who died by suicide while in dispute with the CMS, and the BBC's Panorama investigation in August 2026 put the service's handling of vulnerable parents on primetime television. We have chosen not to name any of the individuals whose deaths have been reported. Their families did not ask to be case studies, and the point of this page is the pattern in the system, not the details of anyone's final months.

The pattern is this: the CMS is a service that writes to hundreds of thousands of people every year about money they owe, backed by the power to take it from wages, empty bank accounts, remove driving licences and, in rare cases, imprison. It knows when its customers die. It does not know why, and, as the next section shows, it very rarely looks.

One review in a year

In February 2026, in response FOI2026/06949, the DWP explained how it examines serious harm to its customers. 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", it carries out an Internal Process Review. Asked how many such reviews in 2025 involved a suicide, an attempted suicide or a serious mental health crisis with the CMS as the primary service, the answer was one. In that one case, the DWP added, enforcement action was not active at the time of the person's death.

Set that against roughly a thousand deaths a year of paying parents in arrears, and the gap is not that the DWP is hiding something. It is that the trigger for a review is an allegation, not a death. Unless somebody, usually a grieving family member, formally alleges that the CMS contributed, nothing is examined at all. We cover how that process works, and how to trigger it, in how the DWP investigates harm to CMS customers.

The questions this data should prompt

We are a transparency site, not a campaign, so we will put these as questions rather than demands. They are the questions we would want a select committee to ask.

• Should the CMS record cause of death where a coroner has determined it, so that a figure like 6,300 can be broken down into something meaningful?
• Should the death of a customer during active enforcement automatically trigger a review, rather than waiting for an allegation?
• Should this data be published as a matter of course, rather than surfacing only when a member of the public asks for it?
• How does the DWP identify a paying parent as vulnerable before enforcement escalates, and how often does it pause action as a result? The February 2026 response confirms that it can; it does not say how often it does.

If this is you

If you are a paying parent and the case has become the thing you think about at three in the morning, please take these three steps in this order. First, talk to someone today: Samaritans on 116 123 are free, open every hour of every day, and will not judge you or tell you to fill in a form. Second, tell the CMS in writing that you are struggling with your mental health. The DWP's own FOI response confirms that "where customers present as vulnerable, enforcement action may be paused or cancelled depending on individual circumstances", but it cannot pause what it does not know about. Third, if the calculation itself is wrong, that is fixable, and our guides on changing a calculation and reducing payments set out how. A CMS problem is a paperwork problem. It can be worked through, and you do not have to work through it alone.