When the State Gets It Wrong: The Child Maintenance Service, £19,000, and a Man Who Owed Nothing
- Falsely Accused Network
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
A statement from the Falsely Accused Network
The Daily Mail has reported the case of John Hammond, a secondary school maths and IT teacher from Peterborough. According to that reporting, the Child Maintenance Service issued him a bill for £19,000. He owed nothing. Not a reduced amount. Nothing.
He spent five years trying to prove it. He won in court twice — in one instance facing the threat of imprisonment — and each time, within days or weeks, the CMS issued fresh demands. In October 2020 the agency took the £19,000 directly from his bank account. He abandoned building work on his home and his family lived without a kitchen or utilities for eighteen months. A judge ordered the money refunded; the reporting indicates the agency continued pursuing him even after returning it. Earlier this year he received a letter confirming the case was closed and nothing was owed — with no admission that anything had gone wrong.
He is now on antidepressants and reports a diagnosis of complex PTSD.
We want to be direct about why we are commenting on this, and equally direct about what we are not saying.
We are not arguing against child maintenance
Let us remove any ambiguity, because this is the point at which conversations like this one usually get deliberately misread.
Children need to be financially supported by both parents. That is not a controversial position and we do not treat it as one. Where a parent has an obligation to pay, they should pay — properly, on time, and without needing to be chased. Parents who deliberately conceal income, manipulate their reported earnings, or structure their affairs to minimise what reaches their children are doing something indefensible, and enforcement against them is entirely legitimate.
The House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee has itself pressed the Department for Work and Pensions to estimate and publish the scale of fraud and error in the child maintenance system. We support that. A system that cannot measure its own error rate cannot fix it — and that cuts in both directions.
Nothing in Mr Hammond's case, as reported, involves a man avoiding responsibility for his children. His children were grown. He had not been liable for years. He had kept records back to 1999 — handwritten notes, bank statements, letters of closure from the agency itself — and by his account those records were simply disregarded.
That is not an enforcement story. It is an administrative failure story, followed by an accountability failure story.
What actually concerns us
Three things.
First, the burden of proof inverts.
When the CMS asserts a liability, the practical position is that the individual must disprove it. Mr Hammond had the documentation. Most people do not keep twenty-five years of financial records, and those who cannot produce them are not thereby guilty. Anyone who has been through the family courts on the back of an unevidenced allegation will recognise the structure of this problem immediately: an assertion is treated as a starting position, and the person on the receiving end must dismantle it at their own cost, over years, while the assertion continues to have consequences.
Second, enforcement powers operate ahead of resolution.
The CMS can apply deduction orders against bank accounts. Those powers exist for good reason — there are parents who will not pay unless compelled. But a power that is appropriate against a determined evader is catastrophic when applied to someone whose liability is wrong in the first place, and who is actively disputing it through the proper channels. Winning in court twice did not stop the process. That should trouble anyone, regardless of what they think about fathers, mothers, or family law generally.
Third, there is no meaningful accountability.
A closure letter with no admission of error is not accountability. The formal routes — internal complaint, then the Independent Case Examiner, then the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman via an MP referral — are real and people should use them, but they are slow, and the Ombudsman route cannot even be accessed directly. The Independent Case Examiner's office investigated 2,142 CMS cases over the last five complete reporting years. That is not a handful of outliers.
None of this is a fringe view. The House of Lords Public Services Committee published *Reforming the Child Maintenance Service*; the Government responded on 9 January 2026, and the Committee replied to that response later the same month, seeking further clarification. The system is under active parliamentary scrutiny. It is not being singled out by advocacy groups.
Solidarity, and a word about what this does to people
We work every day with men who are being processed by systems that have decided something about them and will not easily be moved. We recognise everything in Mr Hammond's account: the disbelief, the box of paperwork nobody reads, the wins that change nothing, the slow conversion of a reasonable person into someone who cannot sleep.
The detail that will be familiar to many of our clients is not the £19,000. It is the moment he described losing control on the phone at Christmas 2019 — and then the ambulance.
If you are in that place now, you are not weak and you are not alone. Samaritans are available free, 24 hours a day, on **116 123**. Please use them.
To every man reading this who is fighting an institution that will not admit it is wrong: keep your records, keep them ordered, and get someone competent alongside you before you are exhausted rather than after.
What we want to see
- Publication of a CMS error rate, alongside the fraud and error estimates already recommended by parliamentary committees.
- Suspension of deduction orders where a liability is under active formal dispute or subject to a live court order.
- A binding requirement on the CMS to give reasons in writing when documentary evidence supplied by a paying parent is rejected.
- Meaningful redress — not a closure letter — where the agency's own error has caused demonstrable financial and psychological harm.
Support your children. Pay what you owe. And expect the state to be able to prove what it says you owe before it takes it from your account.
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The Falsely Accused Network supports people facing false allegations in the family courts in England and Wales. We provide case reviews, McKenzie Friend support and hearing representation. We are not solicitors and this article is general commentary, not legal advice.
falselyaccusednetwork.co.uk | support@falselyaccusednetwork.co.uk | 020 4538 8788
Link to Daily Mail article
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