'The new Post Office scandal': Fathers facing inflated demands from the Child Maintenance Service have been plunged into poverty and even taken their own lives. So why does the agency's £125k-a-year boss sound so bumptiously dismissive?

By TOM KELLY, INVESTIGATIONS EDITOR and TARO KANEKO Published: 23:51, 17 August 2026 | Updated: 23:51, 17 August 2026 Smartly dressed in a suit with his hair smoothed back as he addressed the Lord's Public Services Committee, Simon Hunter said he was 'hugely proud' of the 'modernisation journey' on which he was taking the Child Maintenance Service (CMS). The director of the government agency told the peers sitting in front of him that the high-tech improvements he had introduced were making it 'slick and more usable' and 'incredibly accessible through the digital channels'. His upbeat assessment last year prompted utter disbelief from parents who had suffered huge financial hardships after a string of failings by the CMS so severe that some have branded it the 'new Post Office scandal'. As our damning exposé last month revealed, suspected computer glitches and staffing problems at the government agency have led to parents – the majority of them fathers – being financially crippled, losing homes, suffering mental breakdowns and even being driven to suicide. Some have been plunged into poverty and forced to survive off food banks after long-running problems with the service led to tens of thousands of parents being overcharged – some by vast amounts. The CMS was launched in 2012 after widespread problems with its predecessor, the Child Support Agency. The service is meant to ensure children are properly provided for when relationships end and the youngsters spend more time living with one partner. More than 800,000 British parents currently have their payments to a former partner managed by the agency, amounting to £1.6 billion a year. These are calculated on the basis of their income, how many children they have and other factors. Simon Hunter, pictured during an appearance at a House of Lords Select Committee, is the director of the Child Maintenance Service Under the draconian system, if parents refuse to pay what they claim are inflated demands, the CMS has the power to seize cash from their bank accounts automatically or deduct salary directly from pay packets even while they are appealing against the decision. It can also freeze bank accounts, which has resulted in some parents being barred from withdrawing their savings. Since our investigation was published, we have been inundated by hundreds more parents who have endured similar miseries – parents who related astonishing stories of incompetence and failure by the CMS. One said his maintenance demands jumped suddenly from under £500 to over £5,000 a month after he received a small pay rise. However, none of this seems to have registered with Simon Hunter or the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the government department that runs the CMS and speaks on its behalf. Despite the wealth of evidence produced by the Daily Mail, hours after our investigation was published, the DWP released a statement absolving itself of any wrongdoing. Without a word of compassion for the tragic cases we'd highlighted, the organisation insisted its payment assessments were almost 100 per cent correct. So who is Simon Hunter, the individual who, along with Work and Pensions Secretary and Labour veteran Pat McFadden, is overseeing this sorry excuse for a service? Pat McFadden's Department for Work and Pensions is responsible for the CMS Unlike many senior civil servants, he has a background in the private sector which includes roles at Vodafone and the insurance giant Axa. Before he joined the CMS in May 2023, he also did a stint managing a call centre, while his most recent job was director of customer services at a cryptocurrency trading firm. He earns up to £125,000 a year according to public government records, affording the married father of two daughters a comfortable middle-class lifestyle in a detached home in a smart cul-de-sac in the North-East. According to the family's open social media accounts, they enjoy holidays in the Mediterranean and New York, where in one shot he is posing in Central Park. Other images show them on ski trips and Mr Hunter enjoying a relaxed meal in a pub or out with friends. Since his appointment as CMS director, the agency has also recruited his public school educated daughter, who started in 2025. In January this year, the 21-year-old was promoted to a financial investigator, according to her public LinkedIn profile. All well and good. And, one might argue, fully deserved if the CMS – which after all employs some 5,000 people – was doing its job properly, not least with regard to its IT systems. But as the Mail's forensic investigation last month showed, it patently is not. The refusal of the DWP and Mr Hunter to apologise initially, and Mr Hunter's boasts that he has helped the agency 'embrace the digital era' have only served to outrage the already infuriated parents caught up in this scandal. One of those who feels it most keenly is Gerry McMonagle who spoke to us after last month's article appeared. For years, without complaint, he diligently paid whatever the CMS demanded. The PE teacher, a separated father-of-two, even paid £245 a month voluntarily to his ex-partner through the CMS, until the agency insisted in July 2014 he didn't need to because he was returning to education for a year to train as a lecturer. Then in May 2015, he received a letter from the CMS accompanied by a £5,000 bill for 'arrears'. Mr McMonagle, 45, from Lanarkshire, told us: 'When I saw the letter with the amount they said I owed, I thought I'd be better off dead. I had just bought my first house and feared I was not going to be able to pay off the arrears. I ended up never leaving my home, receiving medical treatment for my mental health, and my relationships broke down.' In a pattern that has become chillingly familiar, the CMS told him it was 'unable to provide' an 'account breakdown' to explain the debt, but admitted it had been wrong to tell him not to pay while studying. That was bad enough. But after a lengthy complaints process, Mr McMonagle discovered another astonishing blunder by the agency – one that he believes explains his 'arrears'. The CMS, it turns out, had added a phantom extra child to his account. 'They would not give me an explanation for how the third child, who had never existed, appeared in my case,' he told us. Gerry McMonagle still faces a CMS debt after the agency added a non-existent child to his account Much of this, of course, happened before Mr Hunter took over at the CMS. But more than a decade on, and three years after Mr Hunter's appointment, Mr McMonagle's debt has still not been written off and he is still facing demands for thousands of pounds from the CMS. He said: 'I can't move on with my life . . . It seems unfair Mr Hunter gets paid so much when the system leaves us in financial turmoil.' Mr McMonagle does not know for certain what caused the extraordinary CMS errors, but there is one clue buried in his agency's internal case file. The note, seen by the Mail, references 'System errors with performance calculations'. This is a familiar story told by many struggling with the CMS, but one the DWP is especially keen to deny, insisting claims of 'systemic IT glitches' within the agency are 'misleading and untrue'. This is despite our first exposé revealing how the minutes from a 2018 CMS directors' meeting show them discussing 'IT issues' and noting that their portal has a 'reputation of not working'. The DWP insists its problems were 'rectified' after 'significant IT improvements' at the end of 2018 – coincidentally the same year the agency stopped keeping minutes at directors' meetings that would have revealed if the problems had continued. But since our first exposé ran, parents who say they are victims of the CMS's Kafkaesque computer system have produced extensive further evidence of continued IT and other failings that almost defy belief. It includes numerous new recordings by CMS staff describing how the system has made errors that led to parents being overcharged. A damning Mail exposé included the story of Jonathan O'Neill, 41, pictured with his sister Joanna Smith, who killed himself in 2021 after a demand for an extra £4,200  To illustrate the point, finance worker Chris Toft, from Cheshire, this week filmed himself trying to access his online CMS 'portal' to show how it was impossible to open crucial notifications. One recent letter notification listed on the site warned him to 'pay immediately or face legal action'. But when he clicked on the notification to read the letter, it said: 'Page not found.' Another father sent a video showing an identical glitch with his portal. Mr Toft said: 'How can I "pay immediately" when I can't get access to read anything? If you get a letter like this meaning you have to pay within a few days and the system is down for a week so you can't see it, you're in big trouble. That's happened to me and many others I know – repeatedly. 'About 90 per cent of the time I can't even log in. I have also tried to send payments and have the system go down.' The portal and IT system were the 'fundamental problems' with the CMS which had led to myriad issues, including Mr Toft being 'overcharged' and 'massive miscalculations,' he insisted. Other parents described either struggling to download vital documents onto the portal or information they had uploaded being ignored for years by the CMS. One described 80 pieces of 'cast-iron and irrefutable evidence' being left unread. Mr Toft said his problems with the CMS had 'left me in a cycle of severe depression and financial hardship'. At one point, having been ordered to pay almost half the £10,000 he earned in a year after being made unemployed during Covid, he said he had to 'scavenge food from supermarket bins'. He added: 'It is ludicrous that the DWP are claiming these problems have been resolved. The evidence is there in black and white.' The Mail has also seen numerous letters to parents from the CMS – most in the past two years – where the agency openly admits that 'technical errors' have led to problems with calculations or payment demands, sometimes on multiple occasions. Steve Martin, from Essex, was paying maintenance for his three children – with whom he did not have contact – until being told by the CMS this was no longer necessary for his eldest because the child had left full-time education. But two years later the CMS sent him a letter saying that due to a 'technical fault' the system had mistakenly taken the eldest son off the case, leaving Mr Martin with a balance that was 'not correct' and owing substantially more arrears than he thought. To his horror, following a court hearing to challenge the new figure, the CMS increased his weekly payments from £98 to £1,922 after wrongly inflating his income by more than 100 per cent. Steve Martin was hit by CMS technical issues - the agency wrongly inflated his income used in its calculations by more than 100 per cent Months later he received a letter saying that its IT system had been 'generating automated letters with higher than usual payment schedules'. Following that, a judge set aside the previous court decision and ordered the CMS to revert its original calculations and arrears to the correct, lower figure. Incredibly, the CMS then told Mr Martin that due to a third 'technical error', the high arrears were still on his balance. The agency said it was 'unable to explain' why this had happened. He said: 'How could they not know? It's a government body, so when it tells me something, I trust their word. I am not one of those parents who doesn't want to pay. I do want to support my kids. 'This shows how many problems are in the system.' When 53-year-old Paul Pizzey from Maidstone called last year to complain about a £3,500 bill he was sure he did not owe, a CMS worker told him the 'mistaken arrears' had been added to his account, which sometimes happened on the system. He said case workers had told him the CMS 'clearly' still had IT issues and one even called its failings the 'will of doom'. In September 2023, Shaun Hancock, 49, from Ossett in West Yorkshire, received a demand for £1,100 a week with £2,100 of arrears on his case and threats to take money from his bank account eight months after he won shared care of his ten-year-old and was therefore no longer liable for payments. Three years later he is still waiting for the issue to be resolved. In response to the latest claims, a DWP spokesman said that while it couldn't comment on individual cases without permission, 'the CMS deals with complex situations within families, in which the interests of both parents don't always coincide, and our priority is to protect children. 'There is no evidence of systemic IT glitches within the CMS affecting calculations. CMS deals with 810,000 maintenance arrangements, and externally audited assessments show high accuracy rates in almost all cases. Payment arrangements are fair and based on the paying parent's income. 'Where parents dispute a decision, it can be appealed, and an independent tribunal will decide if it should be changed.' Following the Mail's investigation, BBC Panorama ran a follow-up in which parents who received the maintenance payments – the majority of them mothers – also described being 'massively let down' and pushed to breaking point after battling with the 'broken' CMS. The original Mail investigation heard from Carl Leverett, 48, who was told he owed £77,000 by the CMS  One said she had to skip meals after her abusive ex stopped paying. Another was forced to use food banks after the agency failed to make her ex-partner pay child maintenance, leaving her £10,000 in debt. This time Mr Hunter responded on camera to say he understood it was 'frustrating' for some parents waiting for maintenance payments when enforcement action was required, and he did apologise to those customers who had 'found it difficult when we have made some administrative mistakes'. But, echoing his upbeat words to the Lords, Mr Hunter said most people were 'highly satisfied' with the service which overall 'worked pretty effectively'. He added: 'The majority of customers who use this service do so without any problems.' Senior advisers at the DWP were also keen to tell the Mail that the situation at the CMS was 'not like Horizon at all', a reference to the computer failings at the heart of the Post Office scandal. Yet Mr McMonagle is far from convinced and takes an understandably cynical view of the public boasts and private spin from the agency. After a decade of waiting for the CMS to put right the financial catastrophe it caused him by charging for a phantom child, he told the Mail: 'This seems worse than the Post Office scandal.'