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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

moved Amendment No. 23: 23: Clause 2, page 1, line 8, leave out subsection (1) and insert— ““(1) The Commission’s main objectives are— (a) to maximise the number of those children who live apart from one or both of those parents for whom effective maintenance arrangements are in place; (b) to secure the payment of any arrears of child support maintenance including sums owed pursuant to the Child Support Act 1991 (c. 48) prior to the establishment of the Commission.”” The noble Lord said: I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 27 and 36. We can dispatch this small group of amendments with some speed, but we need to spend a little time on debt. Amendment No. 23 seeks to insert into the objectives set out in Clause 2 the recovery of debt as a specific aim, while Amendments Nos. 27 and 36 are less significant but have the same purpose, which is to try to tighten up the language and thus reduce the wriggle room for misunderstanding, misapplication or misdirection of the powers to which the objectives in this clause relate. The purpose behind that is simply that if this is to be more of an arm’s-length organisation, we need to make the legislation as clearly stated as we can. I shall detain the Committee briefly on the question of the importance of adding debt to its core objectives as we set up the new commission. I refer directly to the evidence given by the noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie, to the Public Bill Committee in the House of Commons on 17 July at Question 83. He was asked about write-off of historic debt. I shall quote three sentences of his reply, which really stimulates the amendment. The Minister said: "““We would like as many of those old debts to be cleared as possible. Obviously, that is quite resource-intensive, and Stephen””—" that is, Mr Stephen Geraghty— "““may wish to comment on that””," as he does later. "““One of things that it is proposed we do is, rather than write off debt, create a provision for reflecting the effect of inflated or uncollectable 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””." I would like better to understand what that relates to. It was reinforced later by Mr Geraghty at Question 84, when 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 Bill Committee, 17/7/07; cols. 34-5.]" That is the background to the amendment, and it raises some rather obvious questions. They are not easy questions because, for reasons to which we alluded earlier, there is a lot of uncollected debt, some of it allegedly recoverable and some not. In tabling the amendment, I noticed—this made me even more concerned—that the Child Support Agency annual report already has a footnote, which I confess that I do not fully understand, that suggests that some of that debt is already parked. That is not to say that it is not on the books; it remains on the books, but it is in a different part, in a footnote, and it is harder for people who are not accountants to find. Net debt balance is obviously a bookkeeping exercise; I understand that. What I want the new commission to take to its heart as a core objective is to comb through individual cases. That is what parents with care who are owed substantial sums of money are expecting. It is only because of the lack of computer facility and compliance that we are unable to do that with the expedition that people would like. In other clauses, the Bill certainly gives new, useful powers to the agency. That will give the commission, by the end of 2009, at the end of the operational improvement programme, a much more realistic handle on what is the debt book and what is collectable. However, the proposals are very cautious, the proposals for write-off deliberately so. That is probably right because, as Mr Geraghty said in his evidence to the Public Bill Committee, the agency is a long way from knowing how much it can get. I think that the estimates are best guesses rather than anything more robust. Arguably, at some stage, the commission will have to come clean and write to the parents with care involved to say that it does not intend to take any more steps to try to effect recovery of some of those debts. I do not know how that can be done in bulk, but I know that the parents with care I talk to expect nothing less than that their cases will be addressed individually, that some day they will have a day of reckoning and that they will be told what is realistic to be recovered and what is not. If we do not have a clear set of guidelines in Clause 2 that are core principles, the suspicion will be that the commission will quietly turn its back and tiptoe away from those parents. That would be unconscionable, because some of that debt has been accrued because of the incompetence of the agency, which failed to take, or delayed, appropriate action by not using the powers it had had since 1991. As a result, people have lost money—some of them substantial sums. They ask me, why should the Government simply gallop away to a shiny new future and leave all those people behind? That is a perfectly valid question. Amendment No. 23 is only way that I can think of trying to give them some comfort that in the future this new commission will be held to account in terms of collecting arrears. Finally—we will come on to these matters in later clauses—if it turns out that large proportions of these historic legacy debts are to be written off, we need a compensation scheme to deal with it. Where it can be demonstrated that the fault lies in the past incompetence of the agency, expecting people to ask the independent case assessor to take action and go through the formal compensation process would be completely inadequate for the task. A special new compensation package would be needed that could deal sensibly with the numbers we would be talking about. Where the debt was uncollectable on cause shown because the agency did not do its job, there would be some accounting and some money would flow. But none of that can happen until we see what kind of effort the commission makes with these huge residual legacy debts. I could weary the Committee with the statistics; I will not, but I strongly recommend that if we do not put something in the core objectives of this commission on collection of debt, it will be part-forgotten and people will suffer as a result. I beg to move.