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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

To be clear, I am not in any way suggesting that the emotional turmoil that arises from the breakdown of relationships will not be a common feature of the situations that the information and support service and the commission will have to face. The information and support service will have to engage with that; in some measure, by signposting to other voluntary organisations or to mediation. It will be part of the wider picture that the Department for Children, Schools and Families is leading on, and I shall come to that in just a moment. I shall hold on to the point that when we are talking about maintenance in the context of the Bill, that is geared to financial support. Two amendments to Clause 4 have been tabled. Amendment No. 39 would remove the commission’s ability to raise awareness among parents of the importance of taking responsibility for the maintenance of their children. We cannot accept the amendment because it aims to remove one of the two interlocking elements underpinning the promotion of the new package of reforms. I understand that in a sense it was a probing amendment. If the commission is to successfully empower parents it must have the ability to raise general awareness, understanding and acceptance about the importance of parents recognising their own personal responsibility for financially supporting their children, as well as promoting understanding of the ways that can be done. The amendment would prevent the commission from raising general awareness. Amendment No. 40 would place a duty on the commission to demonstrate that it has taken steps to engage both non-resident parents and parents with care equally in any awareness-raising campaigns that it runs. I reassure the noble Lord that I have sympathy with the principle underlying the amendment, but I do not think it necessary. We have deliberately cast the clause broadly and used the word ““parents”” precisely because we recognise that the commission must have the power to promote the importance of child maintenance to all parents in society to meet its central objective. The amendment will also constrain the commission from running targeted campaigns, which could lead to an imbalance in the level of engagement with particular groups of parents and would force the commission either to drop campaigns or to run additional, less necessary campaigns to ensure that it was achieving that balance. For those reasons, I cannot accept the amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, rightly raised the point about how this will serve non-resident parents as well as parents with care, an extremely important issue. One of the ways it will seek to engage them is through awareness-raising campaigns targeted at non-resident parents. If we had to do everything equally at every stage, that would be a distraction. I am not sure that that was the intended import of the amendment but, as it is written, that could be a consequence. Clause 5 places a duty on the commission to provide parents with the necessary information and support to help them choose, make and keep effective maintenance arrangements while providing some basic information and signposting on a wider range of issues as part of that process. Ten amendments have been tabled to this clause, and I will address each in turn. I have assumed that Amendments Nos. 41 and 42 are trying to prevent the commission from providing a limited information and support service for parents, and that Amendment No. 43 has been tabled to ensure that the commission is committed in legislation to providing certain key products as part of the information and support service. The amendments are helpful because they give me an opportunity to set out in a little more detail our thinking on some of the key aspects of the information and support service that we expect the commission to provide at the outset. At present, there is no dedicated service providing parents with impartial information about the child maintenance options that are available to them; yet ensuring that parents can make an informed choice underpins the success or failure of the new system. The current absence of information and support reduces our prospects of realising our objectives, reduces our prospects of putting child poverty at the centre of the reform programme and increases the chances that low-income families will end up making no arrangement at all. So we expect the commission to provide a comprehensive new service that will reach out to newly separating families on low incomes and will be delivered through three channels: a national contact centre, a web-based online service and a face-to-face support service. We expect that those services will be nationally available from around October this year, having tested elements of the service through prototyping prior to that point. At present, we anticipate that the national contact centre will be the primary channel through which the commission will provide parents with information about child maintenance. Although parents will be able to contact the service independently through a freephone number, we are also working closely with Jobcentre Plus and HMRC to enable the commission to ensure that separating parents on low incomes can be identified and referred to the information and support service. Such proactive contact is particularly important given the removal of compulsion, and strong evidence that personal communication with this client group can greatly improve outcomes, for example in a welfare-to-work context. As announced on Monday 14 January, the department has entered into a contract with Ventura to start to develop and run a national contact centre. Ventura has significant experience working with the public sector, through initiatives such as the pension credit application line. I think it is in Rotherham rather than Sheffield; each is north of Luton. We expect information and support service agents to receive comprehensive training developed in conjunction with the voluntary sector and other government departments enabling them effectively to identify parents’ information needs. This will enable national contact centre staff to provide parents with the appropriate information on a range of issues, including the child maintenance options available to them, what those options mean in practice, how to negotiate with an ex-partner, how maintenance affects other benefits and tax credits and a child maintenance estimate of the level of maintenance that a parent would be expected to pay or receive under the statutory scheme. Agents would also help parents to understand what support would be available and their rights and responsibilities under the statutory scheme. Agents would not be expected to directly support parents needing CSA case-specific detail, however, such as the action that the statutory scheme has been taking to secure non-resident parent debts. We also want to ensure that the commission supports parents to act on the decisions that they make—for example, by ensuring that parents can be passed across to the statutory maintenance service where that option is preferred. In addition, we expect that the national contact centre will provide parents who are interested in a voluntary arrangement with tools, such as a standard maintenance form, to guide them through constructing and agreeing their own arrangements. This form will also act as a record for parents to review and maintain their voluntary arrangement. We expect this service to be large-scale, potentially supporting 500,000 parents a year. As I outlined earlier, we recognise that some parents will need additional support to understand their child maintenance options. Evidence strongly suggests that a face-to-face service will be needed to ensure that parents have access to that level of support. We plan to provide that service where a specific need for more personalised support is identified. We need to ensure that there is not just nominal access to the information and support service but real access for those who cannot do so via a contact centre. Research shows that many parents, particularly fathers, prefer to access online services for information. For that reason we expect that the commission will make available a comprehensive website that will provide online information about child maintenance options. It will also include electronic copies of all the information and support guides, leaflets and the standard maintenance form. We also expect that the commission will provide an e-mail function so that parents can receive information without having to contact the telephone service. Research shows that during the process of separation parents often have a number of issues to address in addition to child maintenance, such as those that we touched on earlier. We are keen to ensure that the commission is able to respond to parents who raise wider separation issues during their discussions. We are already working with the voluntary sector and other government departments to ensure that the information and support service can provide parents with a basic level of information or can signpost parents to more specialist help on the key areas that also affect parents during the separation process: debt, housing, employment, legal responsibilities and emotional issues. In light of that, Amendments Nos. 41 and 42 are unnecessary as, in practice, we have every intention of providing a comprehensive and personalised service to both parents. Amendments Nos. 43 and 50 are also unnecessary, for two reasons. First, we fully expect the commission to provide virtually all those elements as part of the overall service, even without a direct mention in legislation. Secondly, we would not want legislation to force the commission to provide particular products and services to parents because future research may well show that those tools proved unhelpful in practice. Amendments Nos. 44 and 46 would commit the information and support service to raising the profile of family mediation services and how they can help parents reach effective maintenance arrangements as well as dealing with non-maintenance issues. We are currently working with the Ministry of Justice and looking to put in place referral arrangements to the family mediation helpline. That should ensure that parents accessing the information and support service can be quickly linked across to local mediators where appropriate. I am happy to confirm that we will be letting people know about mediation and how it can help. Amendment No. 45 would restrict the provision of information and support given to parents to child maintenance issues only. I agree that the commission needs to focus its service on helping parents to make financial arrangements for their children. However, evidence shows that separating parents have to deal with clusters of problems and, as such, it is important that the commission is not prevented from offering some degree of support on the wider issues that often get in the way of their making financial arrangements for their children. We therefore do not accept that amendment. Amendment No. 48 would provide the commission with the power to provide information and guidance in conjunction with public bodies or departments that deliver family breakdown services. The amendment is unnecessary because there is nothing in Clause 5 or any other part of the Bill that would prevent the commission from providing its services alongside other public bodies. In addition, Clause 7 goes even further than that by enabling the commission to carry out work on behalf of other government departments or public bodies and vice versa. We genuinely believe that the suggested amendment is unnecessary to achieve the noble Lord’s aim. Amendment No. 49 would commit the commission to spending at least 15 per cent of its total annual budget on the provision of information and support services. I assure the Committee that we are clear about the critical role the information and support service can play in helping the commission realise all its objectives. In light of the importance of the service, sums have been clearly allocated to ensure that a robust and comprehensive service is put in place. Our approach towards agreeing the commission’s finances will be dynamic and linked to its achievement of particular outcomes. It will not be based around compelling the commission to apportion certain funds towards any particular aspect of its business. We therefore cannot accept the amendment, and I think the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, was of the same view. I hope that I have made it clear how important I believe the information and support service to be in supporting low income parents, in particular, into effective arrangements supporting our child poverty objectives. In doing so, I hope that I have addressed and provided assurance on the issues raised by Amendments Nos. 39 to 50. On the more specific questions raised, the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, referred to the expense of telephones. There will be a freephone number and call centre agents can call back anyone who asks. Low-income parents using a Jobcentre Plus or HMRC can be contacted directly via that source. The noble Lord also raised interesting questions on the scripts for Ventura. Obviously, we are engaging the voluntary sector on that, which will be an important part of the service. I emphasise again that this service has to be available for both non-resident parents and parents with care. The face-to-face service will need to be local so that it is properly available. We are looking at how that service can be built and, moving forward, how the voluntary sector can be engaged in that. I am very keen and very clear that we need to have a robust and sufficient face-to-face service in place by the time Section 6 compulsion is removed. That will be a critical point in the development of the new system. Having said that, I hope that the noble Lord will be reassured and feel able to withdraw his amendment.