An inquest heard yesterday how a father took his own life after he was pursued by the Child Support Agency. As the agency's future remains in doubt, Nick Morrison looks at its troubled history.

IT had a difficult birth, its twos were indeed terrible and, as it approached double figures, it was developing into a problem child. Now, on the verge of its teenage years, there is no sign the Child Support Agency is becoming any less troubled.

From the outset, the CSA has attracted controversy, dogged by complaints that the wrong people have been pursued for cash, that the money was not getting through, that assessments took too long to complete, that its demands were unreasonably high, that too many mistakes had been made.

A Government review on the agency's future is expected to announce its findings within weeks, with options ranging from reform to outright abolition under consideration. But whatever the changes, they will come too late for Peter Phillips.

An inquest heard yesterday how the 45-year-old dad of one hanged himself from a tree near his home in Loftus, East Cleveland. Friends told the hearing Mr Phillips had been driven to despair by the demands of the CSA, which left him so poor he could barely afford a carton of milk.

But the sad truth is that Mr Phillips was not the first man to take his own life under pressure from the CSA. And that despite several attempts to turn it around, the agency has so far shown little sign of improving its woeful performance.

Earlier this week, the LibDems called for the agency to be scrapped, and yesterday it emerged that private debt collectors will be used to collect money from parents who refuse to pay up. The move, which came after it emerged the CSA's enforcement unit cost more to run than it collected, is part of a review of the agency's future. Even though Tony Blair admitted last November that it was not up to its job, the reforms are expected to see it retained, albeit possibly in a different form.

This is unlikely to please its many critics, among them Colin, a 47-year-old from County Durham. Colin saw his maintenance payments, fixed by a court, quadrupled by the CSA's involvement. The only way he could survive was to quit his job and exist instead on benefits. It had a devastating effect on his relationship with the two children from his first marriage, which has now disintegrated to the point where there is no longer any contact.

"It was a nightmare for me and I was effectively forced out of work, it was the only way to preserve my sanity. Without that I don't know what I would have done, and you are no good if you are a dead father," he says.

Colin's two children are now grown up, and he is still paying the arrears in his maintenance. He says the CSA was used as a stick by his ex-partner, but the payments were so high he could not afford to see his children.

"It was aimed at fathers who were not paying but they picked on the ones who were paying because they were easy targets," he says.

Mr Blair told the House of Commons last year that the CSA was "not properly suited" to its task, and that it would be "extremely difficult" to make it cost effective. Figures obtained by the LibDems showed that for every £1 it spent on administration it recovered just £1.85, compared with £8 recovered by the equivalent agency in Australia.

The CSA has also paid compensation to more than 35,000 people for maladministration, with 40 people receiving payouts of between £10,000 and £40,000 over the last four years. Last July it emerged that it had a backlog of 170,000 cases, rising at a rate of 30,000 every month, with another 75,000 cases lost in a £456m computer system. To add to the agency's woes, the computer system itself ran £56m over budget and two years late and is incompatible with the old system, meaning existing cases could not be carried over.

Its caseload of one million families affects one in every 17 people in Britain, but the cumulative debt on the CSA's books is estimated at £3bn, with around £1bn of that written off as unrecoverable. Around a third of calls, 3.3 million, in the 16 months to July were not answered, and a report commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) last year revealed that CSA staff knowingly entered false information on a database, deleted files if they didn't know what to do with them, re-routed phone calls to the answering machines of absent colleagues and sent files to in-trays of those on long-term sick.

"The Government has been very above board that we have got problems with the CSA," says a DWP spokeswoman. "We know there are problems with it, we know it is not right yet but there are no quick-fix solutions.

"That is why we are having a root-and-branch review to look at the whole basic structure."

She says the results of the review will be known within weeks, but that cannot come soon enough for many. Stephen Geraghty, its fourth chief executive in 12 years, was appointed last year with the specific brief of examining the CSA's role, but Jim Parton, of pressure group Families Need Fathers, says it is difficult to see how reform could be the answer.

"It is chaotic, it is inefficient, you can't get through to people to help you, papers disappear or get shuffled around," he says. And he claims the CSA has often been used as a weapon in sometimes bitter family break-ups.

"Sometimes children are told that their dad doesn't love them because he isn't paying, and fathers are often told to pay up in cash, so the mother can carry on claiming benefits, but they don't get a receipt so there's no evidence they have paid," he adds.

"We didn't like the system that went before, which meant court conflict and expensive lawyers, but the CSA decided that money and contact should be separated when they're part of the same thing. It does seem beyond repair."