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Gingerbread’s Misrepresentation of Child-Maintenance Arrears

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  Findings Summary:  Between 2016 and 2024, the charity Gingerbread (No. 230750) repeatedly asserted in media articles, parliamentary briefings, and reports that £3.8 – £4 billion in unpaid child-maintenance arrears was owed to single parents. This figure appeared in The Guardian , BBC News , The Mirror , The Sun , Raeside Chisholm Solicitors , iNews , and Early Day Motion 575 (19 October 2016) — all explicitly citing Gingerbread as the source. However, official findings from the National Audit Office (NAO), Work and Pensions Committee, and Public Accounts Committee (2009 – 2024) confirmed that the overwhelming majority of this debt was fictitious, inflated, or owed to the Secretary of State, not to parents with care. The House of Commons Library Briefing Paper CBP-7776 (2021) recorded that, of the £3.7 billion in legacy CSA arrears, only £0.1 – £0.6 billion was realistically recoverable. On 7 July 2020, the Charity Commission for England and Wales upheld a public comp...
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The £4 Billion Lie

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How the State and Gingerbread Framed Innocent Parents As Deadbeat Dads UK Parliament – Palace of Westminster, home of the Work and Pensions Select Committee and the Public Accounts Committee that examined Child Support Agency arrears. For more than thirty years, the British Government and its favoured charity partner, Gingerbread , have cast one group of citizens as villains: the Non  Resident Parent . Labelled “deadbeat dads,” they’ve been accused of failing their children. Behind that slogan lies a manufactured scandal — a fictitious debt worth billions, created by the Child Support Agency (CSA)  on the 1993 -2003 child support schemes and continues to be collected by the Child Maintenance Service (CMS). The Henshaw Report (2006): The Warning They Ignored In 2006, the Government commissioned Sir David Henshaw to review the failing Child Support Agency. His report, Recovering Child Support – Routes to Responsibility , was blunt: “The Agency has not delivered agai...
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