On 17 August 2026, BBC Panorama aired an episode called “Child Maintenance: Parents Under Pressure”. If you have ever dealt with the CMS, some of it will have felt very familiar. The useful thing is not the outrage, it is what you do with it.
What the programme showed
Reporter Krupa Padhy spoke to parents on both sides of the system, the ones paying and the ones receiving, and found the same thing from both: a service that too often adds to the conflict instead of settling it.
The numbers behind it are stark. The CMS caseload has grown from around 450,000 cases in 2019 to roughly 830,000, while staffing has not kept pace. In the first three months of 2026 alone, almost 61,000 Collect and Pay cases saw no payment made at all, affecting around 86,000 children.
The complaints ran in both directions:
- Receiving parents described chasing arrears for months while enforcement moved slowly or not at all.
- Paying parents described calculations that were wrong or unaffordable, and the stress of trying to get them fixed.
The common thread was that the system’s friction, much of it built around counting overnights, kept two parents at war long after they might otherwise have settled.
What it does not change
It is worth being clear-headed. A hard-hitting documentary does not change the law or your obligations. If you pay maintenance, you still pay it. If you are owed it, you are still owed it. Do not treat the programme as a reason to stop paying, or as ammunition against your ex. Neither helps your children.
What to take from it
The lesson the programme points at is the one we keep coming back to: where you possibly can, keep maintenance out of the CMS machine.
- A family-based arrangement (sorting it privately between yourselves) avoids the fees, the delays and most of the friction. It only works where there is enough trust to keep it running, but where it does, it is almost always calmer.
- If you are on the CMS, keep records. Dates, amounts, correspondence. When calculations go wrong, your own paper trail is what gets it fixed.
- Keep maintenance and contact separate in your head and your behaviour. They are separate in law. Paying parents who withhold money to force contact, and receiving parents who block contact over money, both end up hurting the kids and their own case.
This sits alongside the reforms already in the pipeline: the recalculation trigger dropping from 25% to 15%, and the plan to scrap free Direct Pay and charge a 2% fee. None of that has landed yet, so the current rules still apply.
Source
BBC Panorama, “Child Maintenance: Parents Under Pressure”, broadcast 17 August 2026. The CMS caseload and non-payment figures are drawn from the programme and DWP statistics. See coverage from Shared Parenting Scotland and Hugh James on the CMS under pressure, and our guide to child maintenance and the CMS.
Information, not legal advice. Check the official sources for the current position before you rely on anything here.