On Monday 17 August 2026, BBC One broadcast Panorama: Child Maintenance: Parents under Pressure, reported by Krupa Padhy. It was the most prominent piece of national scrutiny the Child Maintenance Service has faced in years, and it put the service's director, Simon Hunter, on camera to answer for it.

This article covers what the programme found, what Hunter actually said, word for word where we can verify it, and how his account compares with the DWP's own published figures. If you want the background on who Hunter is and where he sits in the chain of accountability, start with our guide to who actually runs the CMS.

What the Panorama investigation found

The programme followed parents on both sides of the service, and the striking thing is that both sides described the same problem: a system that moves slowly, makes mistakes, and is hard to correct once it has gone wrong.

Three cases anchored the programme:

  • Katy, a receiving parent owed more than £330 a month, with arrears approaching £10,000. She told Panorama she had relied on food banks. The CMS promised a liability order against her ex-partner, then the case stalled for 18 months, at one point placed on hold over an address issue. She received a consolatory payment.
  • Susan, a receiving parent whose former partner was abusive, owed more than £10,000. She described skipping meals. A warrant was eventually issued, but she was told the CMS had no warrant officers available to execute it.
  • Gerry, a paying parent who had an extra child wrongly added to his case. His payments trebled to £981 a month. He won at tribunal in October 2025, received a £100 consolatory payment for what the CMS called "gross inconvenience", and was told to recover the overpaid money from the child's mother himself.

Gerry's case matters because it cuts against the lazy assumption that CMS problems are all about parents avoiding payment. He paid everything he was asked to pay. The error was the service's, and the burden of fixing it landed on him. Citizens Advice told the BBC that more paying parents than receiving parents now come to it for help with child maintenance problems.

What Simon Hunter said

Hunter is the Director of the Child Maintenance Service, a senior civil servant inside the DWP. Interviewed for the programme, he defended the service overall, saying it "has worked pretty effectively" and that much of its 800,000-case base is "highly satisfied", with compliance improving over the last three years.

On the individual cases, he did not dispute the failings. He apologised for administrative mistakes in cases where, in his words, "we have made life difficult for our customers", adding: "I absolutely apologise for that."

Pressed on disputed cases, he said: "Every case has its own set of circumstances and there are always two sides to the case as well so… we do work through that as best as we possibly can."

On enforcement delays, he acknowledged the timescale problem directly: "Where the case might be in an enforcement which is a very, very small percentage of our customer base, that journey can be quite an extensive period for customers to be in."

And on lessons from the programme: "Any opportunity for us, for myself, to improve the service, then we will absolutely take that on board."

Why does the CMS call parents "customers"?

If you noticed Hunter saying "customers" repeatedly, that was not a slip. It is standard DWP language. The department describes everyone who uses its services, from Universal Credit claimants to child maintenance parents, as customers, and Hunter used the term the same way when he gave evidence to the House of Lords Public Services Committee in March 2025.

Plenty of parents find the word jarring. A customer can take their business elsewhere. A parent in a Collect and Pay case cannot. Once the CMS holds the case, both parents are locked into its timescales, its systems and its error-correction process, which is exactly what Panorama showed going wrong. The vocabulary of choice sits awkwardly on a service that neither parent can realistically leave.

How Hunter's account compares with the published numbers

Hunter's claims are not invented, but they are selective. Here is what the DWP's own statistics to March 2026 show, all covered in more depth in our CMS statistics guide:

  • Caseload: more than 800,000 arrangements covering over 1.1 million children, up around 300,000 cases in five years, with roughly 730,000 paying parents.
  • Money not collected: in the quarter to March 2026, around 61,000 Collect and Pay cases saw nothing at all collected, affecting 86,000 children. That is a measure of money that did not arrive, not a measure of intent. It includes disputed assessments, employer deduction orders not yet actioned, and CMS processing delays as well as genuine non-payment.
  • Arrears: unpaid maintenance has accumulated to around £790 million since 2012.
  • Complaints: more than 1,400 in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
  • Compliance: Hunter is right that compliance has improved over three years, though a chunk of that improvement came from child maintenance moving to the top of the Universal Credit deduction priority order, not from the service getting faster.

The House of Lords committee that Hunter appeared before went on to describe CMS enforcement as "random, abusive and unregulated". The SNP's Marion Fellows, who has campaigned on CMS failings for years, made similar criticisms in response to the programme.

The reaction

The single parent charity Gingerbread responded the day after broadcast. Its chief executive, Abigail Wood, said the programme reflected what the charity's helpline hears every day, pointed to the roughly £790 million in accumulated arrears, and cited research suggesting that effective child maintenance could cut child poverty among single parent families by a quarter.

The programme landed in the middle of a live reform debate. In June 2025 the government announced plans to move all cases onto a collection service and abolish Direct Pay, with new fees of 2% for each parent and 20% on top for non-compliant paying parents, targeted at 2027-28. None of that has been legislated yet, so it remains a proposal, and we follow its progress on our CMS reforms tracker. Panorama's evidence cuts both ways on it: a stronger collection service could have helped Katy and Susan, but it would have given the CMS even more control over Gerry's money while it was getting his case wrong.

What this means if you have a CMS case

Panorama did not reveal a new scandal so much as confirm, on primetime television, what the published data and parents' experience already showed. Three practical points follow:

  • Errors take a long time to fix, so document everything. Gerry's tribunal win took the best part of a year. Keep every letter, note every call, and challenge a wrong assessment in writing immediately.
  • Enforcement is slow even when the CMS agrees with you. Katy had a liability order promised and still waited 18 months. If you are owed money, chase in writing and escalate to a complaint, then to the Independent Case Examiner, rather than waiting for the queue to move.
  • Consolatory payments exist. Both Katy and Gerry received one. If a CMS error has cost you money or serious inconvenience, you can ask for a special payment as part of a complaint.

For a look at the systems behind these delays, and why a service handling two million calls a year still loses track of cases, see our article on how the CMS technology actually works.