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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

moved Amendment No. 26: 26: Clause 2, page 1, line 15, after ““to”” insert ““encourage when appropriate and to”” The noble Lord said: Here we are again. It is somewhat distressing to find the Minister on his own. He has an enormous set of advisers behind him, but he is looking lonely over there. I am glad to say that I am not lonely as my noble friend Lady Verma, who sometimes keeps me on the straight and narrow, is beside me. Amendment No. 26 is investigatory. It seems to me that the legal framework for CMEC, as set out in Clause 2, imposes an express bias on the objectives of the commission towards encouraging the private ordering of maintenance as opposed to the use of the statutory scheme. I am sure that the Minister will say straightaway that that is not intended and that it does not do that at all. He will have to work quite hard to persuade me. I have tabled Amendments Nos. 26 and 32 to suggest a redress of the bias and to reinstate the statutory route as a viable option. These two amendments are attempts to make CMEC and its statutory scheme more accessible and to convince parents that the CMEC route is the most efficient and effective route to negotiate and to realise child maintenance arrangements. I use them to ask the noble Lord whether this bias will work in the interests of parents with care and their children. Surely the statutory system should be available and accessible as a measure to protect vulnerable parents with care from being forced into unequal bargaining positions when negotiating voluntary arrangements. The statutory system, therefore, should never be tarred as being inferior or somehow substandard in comparison with private ordering. To encourage that, CMEC needs a friendly human face—much more friendly than that which was exhibited, certainly towards the end, by the CSA. Arguably, I suppose, it never had a friendly face, or was never seen to have had one, by the parents we are talking about. Without such encouragement, there is a danger that the parent will not claim child maintenance at all or will feel obliged to settle for unsatisfactory, low amounts. I am pleased to say that this amendment was prompted by the lobby group, Gingerbread. As I suspect that the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, comes from the same source, it is hardly surprising that it chimes in with my own. His amendment is perhaps slightly different. Although much of the Bill is committed to promoting the voluntary side of CMEC which orchestrates mediation and negotiation between the two parents, his amendment seems to enforce the superiority of the statutory scheme. Parents must have faith that, in either system, there will be an adequate resolution and that children, therefore, will be protected either way. I beg to move.