A PROMISE to track down more than £1 billion owed to thousands of single mothers by absent fathers has been abandoned by the Government.

The Times has learnt that ministers will change the law to authorise the Child Support Agency to write off debts where there are “limited prospects of recovery”.

The decision means that about 130,000 single parents will never see an average of £14,000 in unpaid maintenance.

Pressure groups responded angrily to the news. John Wheatley, senior policy officer for Citizens Advice, said: “It seems hugely unfair that the CSA are proposing to wipe this debt off. This debt has accrued directly because of the CSA’s inefficiency in collecting child support and will lead to thousands of families losing much- needed money.”

Lone Parent Families said the consent of parents must be sought before any arrears are written off and demanded compensation for families who had lost money through CSA incompetence.

“In some cases, a debt has become uncollectable because the agency, through its own inaction, has failed to take effective enforcement action,” a spokeswoman said. “In such circumstances there would have to be proper compensation for families who otherwise stand to lose substantial sums of money they are legally owed.”

Details of the debt write-off will be announced next month when the Government publishes a White Paper on the CSA. It will say the time has come to accept that some of the debts are beyond recovery and will set out the formal write-off procedure.

The document will also contain plans to replace the CSA with a new body that will focus on the hardest new cases of fathers who refuse to support their children, and gradually take the backlog of 300,000 outstanding cases. The CSA will remain as a “residual body” to chase part of the £3.5 billion it is owed.

David Laws, work and pensions spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said that the debt decision would trigger outrage and anger. “The Government is abandoning hundreds of thousands of families failed by 13 years of CSA incompetence,” he said.

“What it must not be allowed to do is use a new power to ‘clean up the system’ to get rid of lots of this debt. People have been relying on the CSA to come good and in many cases it stopped them seeking their maintenance on their own through the courts.”

Critics say that the CSA has already given up on many cases. Buried in the small print of the agency’s most recent accounts, it classified £1.9 billion of its £3.5 billion debts as “probably uncollectable”.

In many cases that means that the CSA has lost track of the errant father. It has a poor record of keeping tabs on absent parents and has no powers to require people to inform them of a change of address.

However, in other cases it is as a result of a flawed system of “interim maintenance assessments”, introduced eight years ago to try to frighten absent fathers into paying by threatening them with 50 per cent penalties for non-cooperation. It has been accepted that those assessments were unrealistically high.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Work and Pensions said that the results of a three-month consultation on the CSA would be announced next month. However, a programme of debt recovery launched in August had already resulted in some success. She said more than 9,000 absent father had been informed that their cases would be passed to debt collection agencies if they did not pay up. Immediately 900 had come forward and agreed on a new payment arrangement. A further 4,800 cases had been referred to a debt collection agency for claims totalling £16 million.

Times Recommends

• Legal services 'cut to the bone' as crunch hits
• British judges reject US-style civil damages
• Applegarth escapes threat of legal action