The Child Support Agency should be wound up and replaced unless it can turn around its performance within a matter of weeks, MPs said today.

In a scathing report, the Commons Work and Pensions Committee said it could be five years before the CSA worked effectively, and urged ministers to draw up plans for an alternative.

"We believe the Child Support Agency is a failing organisation which is currently in crisis," it said.

"It is difficult to exaggerate the damage the agency's already low reputation has continued to suffer over the last five years.

"If it is going to take a further five years for the CSA to be fit for purpose, might it not be better to consider a range of options offering a completely fresh approach?"

The CSA has been dogged by criticism and controversy ever since it was established in 1993 to assess and enforce child support payments by absent parents.

It is currently pursuing outstanding payments totalling more than £720 million, while a further £947 million has been designated as "unrecoverable".

A new computer system designed to help cope with backlogs has yet to be made to work satisfactorily, and appears to have made matters worse rather than better. When this emerged last year, the CSA's chief executive, Doug Smith, announced that he was resigning, leaving the agency without a leader.

The committee chairman, Liberal Democrat MP Sir Archy Kirkwood, warned that the CSA was "operating on borrowed time". He said: "Rapid, radical action is needed if the department is to deliver a service that children deserve. If the agency cannot be rescued, then it must be replaced.

"Over half a million children from broken relationships continue to suffer. The woeful record of the CSA is a shameful indictment of the Government’s priorities."

The committee called on ministers to suspend plans to cut a quarter of the agency's staff, at least until its long-delayed CS2 computer system - which should have been introduced at the end of 2001 - was finally brought on stream.

It described the £456 million acquisition of the system from the American IT giant EDS as a "long, woeful story" and said the National Audit Office should investigate why it had gone so badly wrong.

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