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Rarely can a reform with such unanimous cross-party support at its launch have ended up with such universal condemnation. All main parties in the Commons yesterday were united about the shortcomings of the Child Support Agency - the only division being which of the two big parties was more to blame - as yet another director of the agency resigned. Here is an organisation dealing with 1.5 million of the poorest children in the country. Despite a succession of reforms since its launch in 1993, the problems of tracking down maintenance from absent parents have multiplied. In addition to 1m old cases waiting to be transferred to the new system, new applicants have also been facing chaos. Although there have been 476,000 applications from separated parents for support in the last 18 months, only 61,000 parents have made any payments.

The history of failure goes back to the beginning, when the Treasury insisted that any maintenance collected from an absent parent for children living on social security should go back to the chancellor. This was corrected by Labour after 1997, allowing the caring parent, usually the mother, to keep £10 a week, adding an incentive to cooperate. But according to the last annual report from the agency, a quarter of mothers who apply for maintenance receive none at all, while another 20% get less than they are entitled to. With £1bn of maintenance already written off by the agency as unrecoverable, its annual report was still claiming a further £976m could be collected. For nine consecutive years the national audit office has refused to sign off its accounts.

The latest scapegoat is a £456m CPA computer system, which suffered huge delays and is still not operating properly. But Sir Archy Kirkwood, chairman of the Commons select committee scrutinising the agency, was right to insist yesterday the failure was wider and involved "a systemic, chronic failure of management". The scheme has failed to find an appropriate way of calculating payments. Initially, it opted for complexity, making the system sensitive to the many different circumstances separated families face, but creating a bureaucratic nightmare. Labour introduced a simpler system - 15% of income for a first child, 20% for two - which has proved too crude, not least because of a rigid appeal process. A government that had to make up the £10 a week missed maintenance might act more promptly. It should also consider giving the collection task to the Inland Revenue, which has an infinitely better record of collecting money that is owed.