The department’s minister for transformation has cited various recent tech developments to its Child Maintenance Service, including improved routing for calls and a new helpline providing guidance on online services

After acknowledging that helpline callers have needed to wait “longer than we would like”, a minister has claimed that the Department for Work and Pensions has deployed new technology to tackle customer service issues.

According to the DWP’s transformation minister Andrew Western, while the department’s “Child Maintenance Service [is] committed to delivering the best possible service to all customers… [we] fully recognise that call-waiting times are at times longer than we would like”.

Western added: “To address this, we are working extensively to improve the efficiency of our customer interactions through both telephone and digital channels.”

During the final quarter of 2024 the department answered 75% of calls to the Child Maintenance helpline, the latest set of quarterly statistics indicate. This marks an improvement on the low of 59% recorded during the preceding quarter, but is still well below the historical performance levels: throughout 2015 to 2017, the proportion of calls answered never fell below 96%.

The minister, who was answering a written parliamentary question from Conservative MP Nick Timothy – who asked whether the Child Maintenance Service’s helpline is currently meeting its “service-level standards” – said that a couple of recent developments have had a particularly notable impact on work to improve performance.

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“We introduced the Digital Assist Telephony Service September 2024, which has been a significant step forward in our mission to support and encourage customers to use our online services,” Western said. “We restructured our call routing October 2024 to make more caseworkers available to answer telephone calls. By promoting self-service options online and efficient call routing, we have freed up valuable resources to deliver a more responsive service and allow caseworkers more time to better assist customers who need to reach out to us via telephone. Additionally, we have extended the telephony service to 6pm on weekdays to meet demand. and our online services are available to all customers 24/7.”

The digital assist helpline is intended to help guide citizens through the process of using the online options for accessing the Child Maintenance Service – which, having first been launched in 2020, are a relatively recent addition to the DWP’s suite of digital services.

In the budget delivered by the previous government in March 2024, the DWP was given £17m in funding to upgrade the IT systems used to support the delivery of the Child Maintenance Service. Later in the year, the department retained incumbent supplier Tata Consultancy Services on a potential £60m five-year deal to provide digital support for the service’s delivery and ongoing transformation.

A child maintenance plan and payments required for parents of children aged under 16 – or under 20, if the child is in education or training – that do not live together.