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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I am reluctant to get involved in this legal argument that is raging over my head. Australians have found a way to fix some of these problems and Professor Patrick Parkinson came over here. Andrew Selous and Paul Rowen in the Public Bill Committee identified some important policy moves and developments along these lines. The Australian model is simple. It has a system of family relationship centres in shopping malls. They are a mile away from benefit offices, Jobcentre Plus offices or HMRC offices: they are where people need to find them. Professor Parkinson said that the success of these centres is that fathers come into them. I am accustomed to mothers beating a path to one’s door and looking for help. Perhaps it is the function of Australia, but it is having a lot of success in keeping fathers attached to their children simply by the development of these ideas but through a system that is different and separate from a commission. The commission will not have time on its hands. I was certainly persuaded by the plea of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, on that. The commission will have enough to do and, if it does what it is asked to do, it will be a good trick and it will be extremely lucky. At the same time, this sentiment is a powerful part of getting an effective service to families. In an ideal world, you would not need to put it in the Bill. The case being powerfully made is that it may have to be in the Bill so that something gets done, even if it is just the commission saying to the Ministry of Justice or the Department for Children, Schools and Families, ““We’ve got to get together and replicate the kind of thing that is done in Australia””. I am not saying that it is perfect there and I do not know that much about it, but it is done on the basis of serving one in 300,000 individuals. That scheme is in its early days of rollout and implementation, but it seems to be working and is doing the kind of things that these important amendments refer to. There is something there that is important to the future success of this policy. If I were pressed, I would have to say that I would support the amendments, but with an important proviso that you are asking a lot of people in the commission who are not looking for extra things to do. I have put my name to three amendments in this group. Amendment No. 28, which I do not want to spend a lot of time on, talks about maintenance from both parents based on the right of each child, and I exhausted that argument earlier. Amendment No. 33 is what I like to think of as my ““granny amendment””, because when in a previous incarnation I was a solicitor doing consistorial work dealing with broken families in a part of the world that is slightly more matriarchal, it was always the granny who fixed the problem. This was a long time ago when extended families were more extant. Responsible grandparents, or parties like them, can play a role, particularly in relation to Clause 6, where the wife, mother or parent with care is frightened to refer under the new system. Someone needs to be able to shoulder the blame for that and deal with the non-resident parent’s anger and distress when that happens. There is a powerful role for grannies. My granny was certainly a powerful figure in my life. There is a case for looking at third-party involvement in this. On Amendment No. 34, I made the point in passing that children aged 12 can make full applications in their own right to the organisation in Scotland. It has never been clear to me why that is restricted to Scotland; but no doubt family lawyers will tell me that it is to do with the age of majority or minority or something. Children aged 12 are perfectly capable of being asked sensible questions about effective parenting, about what they want done, about how they see the relationship with their father being continued somehow, but we do not ask any questions of 12 year-olds or anyone of a minority age. We should think about that in relation to some of the more general arguments that I have been making. In so far as they go, these amendments have added a lot to our debates and I would support holding on to these thoughts when considering the rest of the amendments. I hope that the noble Lord will get some satisfaction that, however they are delivered, he will get where he wants to be, whether it is by putting these requirements in the Bill or not.