News

Work and pensions secretary Alan Johnson admitted "ultimate" responsibility for the failures of the Child Support Agency last week.

Johnson acknowledged the "huge" failure of the computer system introduced in March 2003 to the select committee on work and pensions.

Currently, only 61,000 support payments have been made out of 478,000 applications.

Committee chair Archy Kirkwood said the CSA's problems were a result of "chronic failure of management".

Outgoing head of the CSA Doug Smith said that the implementation of the system "had not gone well", but denied he was resigning because he had "failed to deliver".