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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, that this is an important and dense group of amendments, which covers a range of issues. The lead amendment is key; but the others in the group deal with the essential area of advice and guidance. The amendments in this group in my name and that of my noble friend are all about trying to beef up, underline and emphasise the importance of getting the information and guidance right. There is a difference between information, guidance and advice, and I think we all understand the difference. Advice needs to be made available to people who are asking questions about what they should do in certain circumstances to be sure that they are getting the best opportunities to improve their life chances and those of their children. The question is how you do that and how you guide the commission to put those services in place. I must say first that I am confident that the commission will have access through various means to parents with care. There are a number of ways, points of contact and steps in the system that give me confidence that it is possible to stay in touch and make contact with that set of parents as the system is currently constructed and as the commission is being asked to operate. I am not confident that we will have anything like the same contact, if any, with non-resident parents. That is my first question: where will the commission look to find non-resident parents? In order to have any chance of having a quality of service between what is made available to both sets of parents—there is an underlying gender equality question there—it is essential that we understand that parents who are absent and are paying maintenance, mainly fathers, are part of the advice and information setup. They are just as important as anyone else. From what I have seen and understand at the moment, I am not confident that that is guaranteed to happen unless we make it happen. Amendment No. 40 in my name and that of my noble friend addresses that question. Amendment No. 41 looks at what is information, what is guidance, what is to be provided, Ventura and all that. My experience with call centres is very clear. Where you are dealing with a client group, for example, in the Pensions Service, who have landlines, who are confident and who know what they are doing, they can sit at home with a glass of malt whisky in their hands and make arrangements. That is a perfect way for the service to be delivered. But I am sure that there is a 10 or 15 per cent residue of clients in that category who will struggle to deal with telephones. A lot of them only have mobile phones; they only have pay-as-you-go SIM cards. Often, they have to resort to landlines—God help them, BT land lines and the like—to make contact. That is not an atmosphere conducive to public service delivery. I understand that Ventura is merely the preferred contract bidder at the moment. It would help the Committee if the Minister explained a little more about what the envisaged contract may look like. We all know what a call centre looks like and we understand that the success or otherwise of call centres depends on how the scripts are worked up and how the professionals who are manning the call centres deal with unexpected questions, because there will be many. They will not just be about how the percentages add up or how the maintenance is calculated; they will get other questions as well. I wonder how the call centre can be configured to deal with the disadvantaged, those who are waiting in long queues outside Jobcentre Plus offices trying to access phones. We have recently had debates about the Social Fund, where some of those real problems were raised. If we are not careful, we will end up condemning clients of the future service to real access difficulties through a call centre. I understand that the call centre is not the complete picture and that other services will be put in place. Contracts are being considered for those and the voluntary sector is being encouraged. It would be good to know what is the up-to-date situation there as well. There is very clear evidence that clients have a very clear disposition and are much more comfortable in a face-to-face situation. The Minister knows that, because his own recently published research reports show it. Again with regard to the Australian experience, face-to-face interviews are particularly important for fathers. If we do not get a process put in place that is robust and looks after people, particularly non-resident parents who want to come to reconnect with their estranged children, the system will fail. The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, is absolutely right that that requires a local dimension; it must not be delivered through Jobcentre Plus or any other HMRC offices. It must be done somewhere where people can feel comfortable. The location of the local service is important. I was interested to read David Varney’s recent report on transformational services. Some of this will be brigaded in the DWP, in terms of taking the government-wide agenda forward. The point that he made, which I found interesting, was that you do not actually always need buildings for local face-to-face contact. There may be—I nearly said travelling circus; I do not mean that—a peripatetic service that can be deployed. Perhaps there could even be some house visits. I am old enough to remember the days when social security services used to do house visits. You often learned a lot more from one of those visits than you do from any form filling, the internet or call centre contacts. The local service, face-to-face and voluntary sector dimension to all this is critical to getting the information and guidance that the Government propose to where I want it to be—which adds up to an advice service in all but name. Amendments Nos. 44 and 46 harp back to the mediation services and the prospect of a one-stop shop, where you can go through the door and, even if it cannot deal with all your needs, at least you will find someone who is intelligent and well trained enough and has the back-up to be able to signpost you to where you really need to be to get the guidance, advice or information that you need. The penultimate amendment in my name and that of my noble friend takes a stab at 15 per cent of a budget devoted to mediation and advice. I have no idea how much that is or anything about it. I am trying to guess at a level below which it is not safe to fall. It is important as to command something like 15 per cent of the totality of the energy, finance and back-up procedures that the commission will need if it is to have any chance to get a really successful sensitive, face-to-face system that is intelligent in guiding parents of whatever kind, non-resident or with care, to where they want to be. The final amendment refers in passing to the costs of telephony. The telephony in the agency has improved, which is welcome, but it is not fair to expect people to run up big telephone bills, as they may if they are using pay-as-you-go SIM cards on mobile phones. I should like some reassurance that whatever shape or form the guidance or information takes, it will not prejudice financially those who have no access to landlines or other means of making contact. This is a big agenda. An enormous amount is covered in these amendments. If we get the subjects contained in this group of amendments right, the policy has a much better chance of succeeding. Contrariwise, if we do not, it is even more likely to fail.