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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I accept that, but the point is that most of the children whom the agency will be working with will not come from a divorce situation because usually the parent with care will not be on benefits and therefore the children will already be within the voluntary system. The children whom the CSA, and eventually CMEC, largely deal with are those where the parent with care is on benefit and the man is either on benefit as well or is a fairly low earner, and the relationship is generally casual or one of cohabitation. This is not a matter to which lawyers may usefully point because those are not the children whom we are dealing with. My second point is that the proposal may be helpful for lawyers in the relatively rare cases where a divorced non-resident parent is being irresponsible, although, in my experience, those fathers who need to pay most do so because they are coming out of marriages in which they have bonded with and become attached to their children. They know how much it costs to bring them up and so they will pay. It is the group that does not come within the ambit of lawyers that presents the problems. Therefore, my concern is that this proposal seems to suggest that those who work to ensure the flow of maintenance—the CSA and then CMEC staff—are being asked to become social workers. We have been careful at every stage of these Bills—in 1991, 2000 and today—to separate the question of child maintenance from contact and all the other issues that can arise. A number of fathers’ organisations would like to see it attached, but I do not think it is reasonable to expect CSA or CMEC staff to take on the responsibility of trying to act as social workers between warring parents. Their job is to ensure the flow of money. Although I sympathise with the objectives and do not disagree with them, I really do not believe that such wording is appropriate in this legislation, as it is in other Bills such as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, where we have also been arguing whether a similar form of words should be included. No doubt the same applies to other Bills related to children. There is a place for such words, but not in a Bill to establish an appropriate mechanism to deliver adequate child maintenance.