NEARLY half of parents in Bournemouth are failing to pay child maintenance to their ex-partners.

The charity Gingerbread, which supports single-parent families, says that payments can lift single-parent families out of poverty and it is "simply not acceptable" that more than 100,000 children nationally are not receiving maintenance.

New figures from the Department for Work and Pensions show that 240 parents did not pay support due through the Child Maintenance Service’s Collect and Pay scheme in Bournemouth between April and June this year.

The figures for Poole is 140, equating to two in five of those supposed to pay through the scheme.

Overall, the Collect and Pay scheme, which is implemented by the CMS when the parents cannot arrange the payments between themselves, covered 510 parents and 710 children in Bournemouth and 330 parents and 450 children in Poole.

The numbers in the data are rounded to the nearest 10.

The CMS is supposed to take money directly from these parents' earnings or their bank account if they try to avoid payments, and can eventually take them to court.

Despite this, 47 per cent had not made any payment in Bournemouth and 42 per cent had failed to pay in Poole.

Across Great Britain, 33 per cent of the 139,300 parents who had to pay through the Collect and Pay scheme failed to pay their child maintenance. Last year this figure stood at 38 per cent.

The CMS, which agrees payment of child support with parents, can alternatively calculate the amount of child support to be paid and parents can make the arrangements themselves – a scheme called Direct Pay.

As of June, two-thirds of parents paying child maintenance in Britain were using Direct Pay and a third the Collect and Pay Service.

Joe Richardson, research and policy officer at Gingerbread said: "We regularly hear from single parents who have battled long and hard, often without success, to secure child maintenance payments to cover the essential day-to-day costs of raising their child. These payments lift many single-parent families out of poverty."

Tallulah Perez-Sphar, from the Department of Work and Pensions, said: "Every day we use civil enforcement action to secure payments on behalf of children and the amount being arranged is up 20 per cent over the past year.

"We’re also doing much better at getting child maintenance debt legally recognised, through Liability orders – and that’s important because once that happens we can take really strong action like forcing the sale of property."

She added that, from April to June, the department worked on more than 2,000 sanctions, including taking away passports or driving licences and pursuing prison sentences, and more than 9,200 payments were made through enforcement agents.