---

Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

My Lords, I welcome the Bill as far as it goes, but it is totally inadequate to address the serious problems that face our society today: dysfunctional families, poorly socialised and undereducated teenagers, and the general lack of appropriate family life. The vast majority of mothers and fathers in this country give priority to their children and do their best for them, but, alas, a small minority do not. There are men who walk away from their responsibilities to form another family or to play the field. There are women who choose to have an unstable family fathered by a series of changing partners. There are families which are torn apart by violence, addiction, poverty, poor housing, mental ill-health or poverty of aspiration. Money is only a small part of the problem. In so far as the Bill helps the resident carer to have more money for their child, it will help, but in so far as it simply reduces the amount of benefits that the Government have to pay to the mother, it will help only the Treasury and not the child. The Bill cannot deliver the social change that our society desperately needs. There is a need for a change of heart. If non-resident parents understand their responsibilities fully, child maintenance will be easier to collect. Unless they understand and accept their obligations to the children whom they brought into the world, the collection of child maintenance may be destabilised, and it may destabilise our society further by seeming to some parents to be totally unreasonable. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham referred to that problem. Ministers often refer to the responsibilities of parenthood. In his opening remarks today, the Minister quoted one of his colleagues in another place who said that although a relationship may end, responsibility to children does not. But where is a clear definition of the responsibilities of parents to their children set out in English law? I do not believe that one is. The definition in the Children Act 1989 does not give any useful guidance on those responsibilities. There is increasing awareness that all children and young people need help to achieve appropriate social and emotional development and communication skills. That process starts at or before birth and goes on throughout childhood. If the appropriate building blocks are not in place by the time the child is 30 months old, he or she will start life with a disadvantage that may grow as he or she grows up. From the first day of his or her life or before, a child needs stability and security based on a loving attachment to at least one committed, stable and caring adult. Secure attachment to an appropriate committed adult, usually the mother, is essential. It makes it much easier for the mother to give the commitment and the time necessary to do the job if she has a decent and committed partner to help and work with her. The child can then also benefit from the secondary attachment to that partner. Committed grandparents, committed kin and a committed community, where it exists, can also be important. To enable more of our young people to succeed in their lives we should address their need for a strong and supportive family group in which to grow up. The most important first step in this direction must be for our society to agree on what part of the responsibility for parenting a child belongs to the parents and what help and support parents should be entitled to expect from the state, their neighbours and their extended family respectively. Both parents, in so far as they are able, and as long as they are alive, must share the responsibilities of parenthood. Is that the Government’s view? As we very properly place a financial maintenance burden on the absent parent, are we, and they, not entitled to know whether the resident parent is doing his or her part of the maintenance job properly? It may seem politically incorrect to suggest that a mother would not be doing her job properly while the father was absent, but let us reverse the scenario and suppose the courts have given care of the child to the father. Surely the mother will not only want to be sure that the money she is providing is being used properly, she will want to know that the child is being looked after properly. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, referred to the entitlement to maintenance which should attach to the child. That is another interesting thought in the context of what I have just said. Any solution to our present problems will inevitably involve focusing most support from the Government, the state or the taxpayer on that minority of families who are struggling. As we do so, however, it is important not to create a perverse incentive. The parenting behaviour of those who give their children the care they need must be rewarded and encouraged so as to encourage others to do the same. That may be difficult to build into the system but we need to think about it. The Bill rightly provides a douche of cold water on the heads of some of those parents who shirk their responsibilities, but it fails to look at the problem in the round. It does not set its proposals in the wider context. The Bill would have been more acceptable and workable, in an ideal world, if it had been part of a Children Bill that clearly set out the responsibilities of parenthood in our society as we understand them today. One way to do that would have been to adopt the neat and sensitive definition of parental responsibility that already exists in the Children (Scotland) Act 1995. In summary, the definition is: the making of a long-term commitment to safeguard and promote the child’s health, development and welfare, and to provide direction and guidance to the child in a manner that is appropriate to its age and development. The Bill should have had that definition as its first clause. Although the Short Title of the Bill makes it impossible for me to table a first-clause amendment, I shall introduce amendments to the text of the Bill that will test the Government’s commitment on this issue.