A CHORLEY man has told how he was driven to the brink of suicide after the Child Support Agency (CSA) bungled his payments leaving him more than £6,000 in arrears.

Dennis Rostron, 38, of Lakeland Gardens, was told by the CSA in April last year that he would have to pay £145 a month towards the upkeep of his three sons.

Then in September this year he received a letter from them saying they had recalculated his payments and he should have been paying £469.30 since February last year.

They said he was now £6,139.33 in arrears, and to make up the deficit he would have to pay £492.70 a month.

The error occurred because the CSA should have carried out checks every 13 weeks - in fact nothing was done from April 2000 to July this year.

Mr Rostron dismissed a compensation payment of £125, sent by the CSA along with a letter of apology, as a slap in the face.

Last month Mr Rostron, who has been on anti-depressants for the past three years since getting involved with the agency, was left with £900 to support himself, his girlfriend and her daughter, and to pay his mortgage, car loan and credit cards.

"It's not enough for me to live on," he said. "I bought a house and budgeted my lifestyle around paying £145. Now I am being told they want more.

"It's unfair and unjust. Since September I have been constantly on the phone. I have been driven to such an extreme that I'm on the sick for two weeks."

And he revealed: "I'm on anti-depressants and sleeping tablets - I even tried to commit suicide two weeks ago.

Mr Rostron, a service engineer, said he had also thought about putting a pipe on the exhaust of his van to kill himself. You see things like this in the papers and think things could never get that bad, but until you are thrown into that situation you don't know.

"I have not slept properly for three years. I can't relax at night and can't sleep for tossing and turning. Since I was prescribed sleeping tablets 10 days ago it's the first decent night's sleep I have had.

"I feel physically sick. There's no part of the day that it's not on your mind."

To make matters worse, he said he had not seen his children, who now live in Wigan, for two years until recently.

Mr Rostron has enlisted the help of Chorley MP Lindsay Hoyle who has written two letters to the CSA on his behalf but was still awaiting a reply as the Citizen went to press.

The letter of apology from the CSA, said: "It is clear that you have not received the level of service that you should have from our Birkenhead Centre." It added: "Such inconvenience payments are made by way of an apology for agency maladministration and whilst not usually large sums of money, they are nevertheless a tangible recognition that an error or maladministration has occurred."

Mr Rostron has now joined the CSA Fellowship in Wigan, a support group for people in a similar position there, and is hoping to expand the group into Chorley.

He said: "We need to bring it to people's attention how unjust it is. I realise the children do need the money and because of that I have voluntarily had a deduction of earnings order so they could take it straight out of my wages.

"I am even considering going to the European courts because of the human rights issues. The system is just so unfair. They don't seem to target the people who won't pay, they target the people who are paying and they are quite happy doing that.

"I never ever thought I could get to such a position where I could contemplate suicide, but in the last eight weeks I have."

A report out this week found that the CSA had written off £713.4 million of debt in the last year in addition to £556.4 million written off in previous years.

A spokesman for the agency said: "It is right that child maintenance changes to reflect the circumstances of the parents.

"If this causes a debt then the CSA will collect it, but the agency is always sensitive to the burden this imposes."

Anyone who would like to join the CSA Fellowship can contact Dennis Rostron on 07714-157324.