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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I am grateful for colleagues’ contributions. It has been an important debate. I am not confident that the flow and quality of the management information available to the commission will enable Parliament, looking just at quarterly statistics, to be sure that the consideration of children as a priority of the commission will be able to be monitored effectively or guaranteed. The amendment, inadequately drafted as it may be, seeks merely to give weight to the objectives and the importance attached to the people who run the commission, who will be under enormous operational pressure to reduce the case load at every conceivable turn, which is not the object of the exercise. The object is more broadly drawn.