FAMILIES: The new £20 charge to use the government's child maintenance service could leave separated parents without any support arrangements in place for their children, MPs warned yesterday.
The Public Accounts Committee said there was worrying uncertainty about the impact of the £20 fee hitting low-income families who use the service to assess, collect and make payments.
Chairwoman Margaret Hodge said: "There is a risk that some parents end up reaching no arrangement at all, to the detriment of the children involved.”

SEXUAL ABUSE: A woman said a retired doctor who was jailed for nine years yesterday for sexually assaulting her when she was seven or eight years old has wrecked her life.
A jury heard how Ahmed Masood, 71, from Bradford subjected a young girl to a series of sexual assaults between 1982 and 1985 which a judge said would have been classified as rapes if they had happened today.
After Masood was led away to prison, his victim said she just wanted him to apologise for what he has done and urged other victims of sexual abuse not to wait 30 years before reporting their experiences.

FAMILIES: The average cost of raising a child to secondary school age is almost £84,000, according to a survey for the Halifax bank.
The bulk of the total £83,627 bill comes from childcare before children reach school age, which stands at around £41,139.
Parents were on average found to be spending £633.54 a month on their children, adding up to £7,602.50 a year.

ENVIRONMENT: University students are being urged to urinate in the shower in a bid to save water, the BBC reported yesterday.
The Go with the Flow campaign is the brainchild of students Debs Torr and Chris Dobson, from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich.
They want the university's 15,000 students to take their first wee of the day while having their morning shower and Mr Dobson said it could "save enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool 26 times".