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Welfare Reform and Incapacity Benefit

The hon. Gentleman is right. In fairness to the CSA, the hard core of cases that it is trying to deal with involve some of the most difficult families in the country in terms not only of their willingness or otherwise to make the assessed maintenance payments, but of the number of changes in their circumstances. That argues for introducing a simple system and—to us—for folding the CSA into the Inland Revenue, so that it can use the large amount of information that the Revenue already holds on people’s incomes. It probably also argues for greater use of deduction at source from the earnings of those who are unwilling to pay, which is the Australian approach. The Australian deduction-of-earnings-at-source rate is about twice the UK’s. As a constituency MP, I am often amazed by the reticence of the CSA to put deduction-of-earnings orders in place, despite the fact that people are often not willing to meet their maintenance liabilities.