---

Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I confess that when I first looked at the Bill and saw Clause 2 and realised the connotations of the voluntary maintenance arrangements system—which is not proposed in the Bill because you cannot propose a voluntary system in an Act of Parliament—which is in the Minister’s mind, my first reaction was that there is no way of policing this, so you do not know what is going on. The Minister says, ““There is this wonderful new system up in Sheffield of advice and support, and we will know exactly what is going on because they will be giving advice””. Who will they be giving advice to? The person who is going to go to Ventura is almost certainly the parent with care on their own. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, would know better than me, having been responsible in this area. I imagine that where advice is being sought, it is very much applied for on one side or the other. Surely to goodness it is most likely to be the parent with care of the child or children who will want to seek advice. There is a sort of self-policing mechanism in the Bill, because as the Minister has rightly said, if the parent with care fails to strike an agreement with the absent parent, or does so but the money is not forthcoming, they can always turn to the statutory system. We know that, on average, absent parents lose contact with their children after about three years. By the time the parent with care has gone to seek advice for moving to the statutory system, she will have been out of pocket on behalf of her children for a considerable length of time. A registration of voluntary agreements looks to me to be a good idea, but it would only tell us in the broadest terms—like any of the statutory bodies that produce research and figures—whether the voluntary service is contributing to poverty among children, the reduction of which is, rightly, a stated aim of the Government. When the Minister talked about information flowing because of tax credits, I was very surprised because, yes, tax credits are applied for because of a level of income, but maintenance arrangements have a 100 per cent disregard in tax credits, whereas these arrangements go only to a maximum of £40 disregard. Unlike the noble Lord, I am no mathematician so I do not know the answer. However, there must be a difference in those two arrangements for the money which ultimately flows to the children.