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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, and the Minister for their comprehensive and measured speeches which started this important debate. The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, is absolutely right that the Bill does not have an awful lot of party politics in it and deals with situations arising from the past. It has had, generally speaking, all-party support; although it is a little rich for the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, to accuse the Government of having a duff computer system when the original EDS contract was struck in the run-up to the 1991 legislation under, the noble Lord may recall, a Conservative Administration. But I do not want to go there, because I think that he struck the right tone and I want to continue that. I start with a contingent declaration of interest. I was reading my Sunday Times the other day and was so moved by an advert I saw soliciting applications of interest to join the CMEC board as a non-executive member that I could not resist the temptation. My colleagues think that I have lost my reason and common sense to want to spend my spare time trying to run the successor to the Child Support Agency rather than attending to my garden. This has been received with some scepticism on the part of my colleagues, but for my sins I have applied. I hope that Sir Alan Sugar is not the chairman of the appointments panel. I will report progress as the Committee stage unfolds. I have been involved in the policy of the Child Support Agency legislation, and a bit like the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, I know more about the Child Support Agency than is good for either of us. She has had a chance to try to make it operational on the executive side of the table. If I buy her a cup of coffee later, maybe she will talk me out of it. I have made the application, and time will tell what will flow from that. The context of the Second Reading is very important. The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, is right; this is an attempt at a clean break, and I am sure that the Minister is genuinely trying to achieve that. There is a legacy that cannot be ignored: the backlog of cases and, in the view of the Public Accounts Committee last July, a culture of non-compliance which has built up over the years and is no one’s fault. That is where we are. We are in a position where people think that they can thumb their noses at this type of government organisation. That cannot be ignored. We are also inviting this new organisation to run three systems; not one system, CSCS, not two systems, CS2, but three systems for a period of years until cases can be transferred across and properly catered for. We as policy-makers have always underestimated the determination of non-resident parents—mainly absent fathers—to pay nothing; the square root of nothing at all towards the maintenance of their children. Any idea that this organisation is failing because it has an easy client group and that all it has to do is knock on a door to get a cheque is cloud-cuckoo-land. We must recognise the difficulties that members of staff face in trying to deal with a very non-compliant client group. Two important things have changed recently, and we should not ignore them. First, there is the extent of household debt in the United Kingdom. In 1993 when this all started, there was not anything like the residual, chronic, built-up levels of debt which make it more and more difficult for a lot of the households that we are dealing with in the 1.4 million caseload that the organisation has to get through the week, never mind pay any extra money. It is not easy for them either. On the other hand, I read in the Guardian on 7 December that the Liverpool Victoria estimates that it now costs £186,000 to raise a child from birth to 21 in the United Kingdom. That has rocketed in the past three years. There is an environment in which the legislation is being introduced that we cannot ignore. More than anything else, we cannot ignore that the problems with the computer systems and telephony systems have still not been resolved. The Child Support Agency annual report, incidentally, was delayed for six or seven months. It was due in July and it was produced only a few weeks ago. Everyone should take 10 minutes to look at what the Auditor-General and the chief executive of the CSA, Mr Stephen Geraghty, a man for whom I have a great deal of time, are saying in the report. He is the first chief executive who I have come across who is able to get on top of this if anyone can. He talks about 600 work-arounds still being necessary to get management information. It is not just that they cannot get the assessments right; they do not have the management information to know whether they are making progress. It should surprise no one that the Comptroller and Auditor-General is qualifying the accounts of the CSA. I am disappointed and fearful that the latest computer release, the so-called PR1 release, which was due to be in place by now, is scheduled to go into place at Easter. The undertaking was that it would be done in this financial year, and the Government may squeak that by a matter of days, but it was supposed to be in place months ago. That is another symptom of the fact that we still have not cracked the technology and telephony that provides a platform for this policy. I am worried about that. Despite all our endeavours and people doing the best they can in good faith, there is still a high risk that this policy will fail. One of the reasons for that is that I do not know whether anyone can get to grips with the behavioural changes that will flow as a consequence of the abolition of Section 6. The regulatory framework statement suggests that we will lose 400,000 cases so that the caseload will fall from 1.4 million to 1 million. There will be a little more capacity in the system, and the theory is that that will free up the organisation. I have no idea how that can be judged when we have not seen a business plan; all of that is being left to the organisation once it has been set up. I am sure it will do its best, but this a shaky basis on which on make plans. Further, I am sure we will discuss in Grand Committee the consequence of leaving people to their own devices: that we may end up back in the same position as in 1991. If there is no way of checking on what is going on, the Government’s child poverty targets could be challenged as people fall out of the system altogether. We will have no way of knowing what has happened to them, and so we will be back to where we started. Voluntary agreements and so on need to be looked at carefully in Grand Committee, because I am not convinced that we will not end up cutting our noses to spite our own policy faces. Sir David Henshaw did a very good job and we have missed an opportunity here. We have had Statements in this House about his work, which were precursors to this legislation. Taking the 1991 legislative template and using it in 2007 is a mistake. Circumstances have changed and I would have much preferred to have taken this opportunity to make changes. However, I accept that it is too late to do anything about it in the Bill. The current mood is to move towards trying to enshrine child entitlements rather than simply providing a template to ensure that the number of agreements drawn up and payments made are increased. That is all this Bill does. It is a mechanism that tries to sustain the number of payments being made. Increasing the transmission of money is all it seeks to do. I refer the Minister to a letter in the Times today signed by representatives of serious organisations such as the chief executive of Relate, Clare Tyler, and her colleagues. They make very clear the importance of the opportunity before the Government and talk mainly about getting joined-up support for parents. The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, was right to refer to that and we will return to the point in Grand Committee. Work being done by academics in other jurisdictions is looking at trying to invest in children the entitlement to pursue what is good for them rather than what is happening above their heads to the relationship between the non-resident parent and the parent with care. I hope that we will bring forward some amendments on that to test the ground. I do not want to try to delay this legislation by standing it on its head and trying to wreck it, but in the fullness of time the policy framework for this area will come round to that way of thinking. The Bill has to get three things right. The weighting is wrong at the moment. Obviously the instructions given to parliamentary counsel seek to put a bias towards trying to filter people out of the system and into voluntary arrangements. I understand that; it is what Henshaw talked about and I make no complaint about it. But as the Bill is framed, the weighting is wrong: other priorities should be included in Section 2, right at the heart of the instructions we are giving to this new body. They are simple and straightforward, and most of them were referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale. They include getting the best guidance for the client, not for the organisation. We should not show people the door, saying to them, ““Walk through here and enter the rosy hinterland of a voluntary agreement because it is in our interests to get rid of 400,000 cases””. We need a cross-departmental support system that is more than a call centre and an offer of a face-to-face interview with a website. I do not think that that measures up to anything like what we need to do this job properly. Getting that right is the core of making this legislation work—but we also need to get the calculations right first time. They need to be accurate and we need to get the computer system fit for that. That is a priority. Another priority is the efficient collection and payment of maintenance and getting the flow of money. At the moment, there are still problems with getting the money out when it has been brought in. Finally, there is the question of recouping historic debt. I did not quite catch some of the suggested amendments that the Minister discussed in his helpful speech, but we will get a chance to study them when he tables them. Expanding the types of accounts that you can attack is an obvious solution. People will think that we are stupid if we say that all that we can get to is a simple current account when someone can make a telephone call and make it a joint account with their granny, protecting it from attack from the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission. That makes us look stupid. I understand that there are differences in legislation on joint accounts between north and south of the border, but Stephen Geraghty says in his annual report that there is £1.5 million of debt that he believes is still collectable. That is another priority for the organisation. There is a danger that getting on to the new system and getting people organised properly will put that £1.5 million of debt on the back burner. As the House knows, nearly double that amount is listed as debt—but that £1.5 million of collectable debt needs to be seriously attacked by the new organisation. All this will be dependent on resources. We know that the profile of the staff head count will fall to 9,000 before too long. We need reassurances that if this change gets a bit more pesky than the Minister suggested it might, that head count must be retained until we get the new system operating smoothly. That is essential. I know that the department has a very tight departmental expenditure limit and that there are no blank cheques in government, but we need to look at the Gershon proposals and the resources available and ensure that for the third time this does not fail because the staff are not sufficient to do the job. We need to recognise, as the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, did, that motivation of the staff is important. The Crown agency development is very welcome, because it means that people can transfer confidently between the Civil Service and other departments. I think that that is good; I do not know why it is restricted to three years, but it is a really positive outcome. Lastly, there is a very great deal still to know about what we should expect from this new body being set up in the Bill. One suggestion that I should like to make is that the Social Security Advisory Committee may not be capable of having formal references for these regulations that will eventually apply to CMEC. I do not know whether that is true but, if it is possible, I should like to see the SSAC’s remit stretched so that any future regulations that deal with CMEC in this important area of policy are scrutinised publicly in the accepted way by the SSAC. However, I do get boring on that subject because I am always looking for ways of mentioning it. This is an important Bill. A lot of the problems are operational—there are not a lot of politics in it—but it is important for those whom it seeks to serve and important that we get it right. This will be third time lucky, I hope. We are all sentenced to doing a lot of Christmas reading of House of Commons Committee sittings on the Bill. I look forward to that and to taking part in our Grand Committee sittings—and I wish the new organisation, whoever it consists of, the best of luck.