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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

As the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, said, this has been a heavyweight discussion. I start by speaking to Amendments Nos. 24, 25, 30 and 35. They seek significantly to extend the remit of the commission beyond child maintenance to include the promotion and encouragement of parents’ responsibility to provide welfare and support for their children and the encouragement of absent parents’ relationships with their children. Of course I have some sympathy with the noble Lord’s intentions, which fit well with overall government policy towards children and their parents. However, I agree with my noble friend Lady Hollis that we must ensure that the primary focus of this Bill is to maximise the number of effective maintenance arrangements in place. That is what the Bill is about. Noble Lords will recognise the enormous challenges facing the commission. At present, for example, there are no large-scale services providing information on child maintenance options and no support to put in place suitable maintenance arrangements. With the removal of compulsion, it is therefore essential that the commission concentrates on putting in place effective and easily accessible services to ensure that, when compulsion is removed, parents have access to support that will help them move into appropriate and effective maintenance arrangements. As we touched on earlier, the Department for Children, Schools and Families has lead responsibility across government for family policy. Supporting parents in supporting their children is a strong theme throughout its recently published Children’s Plan. The commitments in the Children’s Plan have a number of synergies with the work of the commission. In particular, it outlines the DCSF’s commitment to, "““work across government and with other organisations to launch work on how better to support parents (including non-resident parents) and their children during and after family breakdown””." In the light of that, we are already working with officials in the DCSF who have responsibility for the commitments in the Children’s Plan to ensure that the commission feeds into the development of policies in this area and that information and support are seen as part of the overall provision of services for separating parents. This is because we want to ensure that lessons learnt from the commission are utilised across government. We also want to ensure that parents can be effectively linked to appropriate support at whatever point they access government-funded services. We are keen to ensure that, where possible, government-funded services are effectively joined up to prevent parents becoming confused by the system or failing to engage with services. The Children’s Plan sets out a vision for more co-location of services to support this joining up. The Government also recognise that services will be more effective if the people using them are involved in the design and delivery planning of the service, and the Children’s Plan sets out proposals for parents to be involved in this at a local and national level. The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, referred to the debate on the Children and Young Persons Bill. Noble Lords may be aware that, because of this debate, my noble friend Lord Adonis has agreed to consider whether there is a case for amending the Children Act 1989 to include a more substantive definition of ““parental responsibility””. However, he has made it clear that at this stage the Government are not committed to such a change. If that were to come about, I suggest that that Act would be a more appropriate place for such a definition. In any event, as I understand it, the amendments are not seeking to define parental responsibility in a broad way; rather, I believe that they focus on promoting responsibility. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, who is hugely experienced in this area, said that it would be helpful to the courts, to the extent that they are involved, to have something that they could point to when encouraging arrangements to be put in place. I am not sure that the amendment provides the required definition but, in any event, if you wanted something to point to, is there not already a definition in the 1989 Act? It may be inadequate but there is a definition there which makes reference to parental responsibility, as expanded by case law. If you want something to point to so as to help and encourage engagement in maintenance arrangements, I question whether there is not already something there for the courts to use. Under Clause 4, there is a requirement to promote child maintenance. The commission must take such steps as it thinks appropriate for the purpose of raising awareness among parents of the importance of taking responsibility for the maintenance of their children and making appropriate arrangements for the maintenance of children who live apart from them. That is the proper role of the commission set in the context of the wider policy in which the Department for Children, Schools and Families is engaged. I believe that we have a shared agenda here. The question is how best we can move it forward, but I honestly do not think that this Bill provides the right mechanism. I hope that I have provided noble Lords with the reassurance that we are part of a wider government agenda for focusing on parents and their needs. However, I cannot accept these amendments because they significantly extend the remit and responsibility of the commission beyond the central objective on which we need it to focus. Amendment No. 28, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, links back to our earlier discussion on the proposal for a new approach to child maintenance legislation. The amendment would make it an objective of the commission to prepare a scheme of child maintenance based on this new approach. Our earlier discussions set out our position on these changes. The Bill focuses on solving the immediate problems facing the child maintenance system. Furthermore, the noble Lord’s proposals would require fundamental changes and, while the commission would almost certainly have a role, central government is best placed to lead on such changes, especially in view of the work of DCSF. Amendment No. 33 would enable third parties to make a statutory maintenance claim on behalf of a child when a voluntary arrangement can be shown to be harmful to the child’s long-term interests. This would negate one of the key things we are trying achieve with the repeal of Section 6 by reintroducing a form of compulsion and state intervention for some cases. It would therefore undermine our aim of encouraging parents to make their own decisions about maintenance for their children and raise again the potential for a state-imposed solution regardless of their wishes. The commission will introduce a high-quality information and support service to enable parents to make informed choices about the maintenance arrangements that suit them and their children best. This may be a voluntary arrangement, a court consent order or a statutory maintenance arrangement. The amendment will allow anyone to make an application regardless of their relationship to the child, and there is no indication of what tests would be applied to determine whether a voluntary arrangement by the parents would be harmful to the child’s long-term interests, or, indeed, who would be responsible for applying that test. Amendment No. 34 seeks to extend to children aged 12 and over in England and Wales the right to make an application for a maintenance calculation. As has been noted, this provision already exists in respect of such children in Scotland. As the Committee will be aware, in Scotland children have different rights to children in England and Wales and different legal systems exist. Under Scots law it is presumed that children aged 12 and over have the capacity to make informed decisions about legal proceedings which affect them and the ability to instruct a solicitor to raise court proceedings, which could, for example, include suing a parent for aliment, the obligation on a parent to maintain a child. When we replaced a court-based system for child maintenance with the CSA scheme, we wanted to ensure that provision was included that enabled Scottish children of 12 and over to retain the ability to apply for maintenance. In England and Wales there is no such tradition of children being allowed to seek maintenance from the courts on their own behalf. This has always been done by their parent or guardian. We believe there is no case for changing the laws of England and Wales to match those of Scotland in this respect. In any event, we understand that this right is rarely utilised in Scotland. We do not believe that extending it to children in England and Wales would meet a real need. We would not want to disrupt the structures of family law simply to take account of the different legal framework in Scotland. In view of what I have said, I urge the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.