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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

In principle, I support what hon. Members are trying to do. Like other hon. Members, I have many constituents—mostly, but not exclusively, women—who are owed huge debts by absent parents. Those absent parents have been chased for many years, but, to date, there has been little success in obtaining the money. However, there is one point that gives me some concern. The question of how the historic debt arose was raised during the evidence session in the first sitting of the Public Bill Committee. In particular, in the early days, if the CSA could not get in touch with somebody or somebody did not respond, it would often put in an assessment on the basis of an assumed income, which was much higher than the person's real income. As a result there is a large historic debt, going back many years, based on an income that the person who owes the debt never had. One could argue that that is the person's own fault for not dealing with the CSA in the first instance. However, it raises the question of what we are going to do about setting out the true level of historic debt. When we asked Lord McKenzie about that point in the evidence session, he said:"““We would like as many of those old debts to be cleared as possible. Obviously, that is quite resource-intensive…One of the things that it is proposed we do is, rather than write off debt, create a provision for reflecting the effect of inflated or uncollectible debt in the account. However, those debts would remain in being and would not be written off until there is consent from the parent with care.””" The difficulty with that approach is that there could be a large debt that was not actively chased on behalf of the parent with care. In fact, nothing would be done with it—it would simply sit on the accounts of the CSA or CMEC. When Stephen Geraghty was asked about this, he said:"““There comes a point in any debt collection exercise where it is a question of how much we can get. I think that we are a long way from that, but presumably the commission and Parliament will, at some point, want to consider whether they want to keep the debts going.””––[Official Report, Child Maintenance and Other Payments Public Bill Committee, 17 July 2007; c. 34-35, Q83-84.]" There could be two types of debt: debt due to the Treasury; and debt due to parents with care. While I fully support what the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) is trying to do—I do not want real debt to be written off either; I want it to be pursued—I am a little worried about how we set the level of the debt. Will we take any account of what was, presumably, inflated debt in the first instance?