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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

The distinction applies because in a voluntary system, where the mothers are not on benefit, as opposed to where they or even both parents are on benefit, the couples are far more likely to come out of a divorce situation. When you come out of a divorce situation, questions of child maintenance are regulated by the courts and in the shadow of the CSA; there is often a long period of bonding with the children and he is anxious as a committed father to continue that relationship of parenting. The problem is, surely, that when she is on benefit and he is too, and being recycled between JSA and work, at best there may have been a fairly tenuous cohabitation and quite possibly they have never even lived under the same roof together. So there is a real distinction between the types of couple. We know that there is a 25 per cent overlap or churning between the two categories every year, but none the less there is a real distinction, in broad terms, between the commitments to their children of those fathers who have come out of a divorce.