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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

The debate has been valuable. I want to reflect on what has been said. I have two queries. First, the commission will have such a difficult birth and early period before it gets into a stable state, if it ever does. I am prepared to believe that the work done in Bolton, such as it is, and the work that the debt collectors have done, such as that is, has helped a little, but I do not think that that is the point. The question is whether the public servants in other parts of the system, having been tasked with a certain amount of work, get the same results with less effort, less energy and less expense. That is still an open question. If the commission goes heavily into contracting out at an early stage, it will have so many other fronts on which to fight that I do not think that would be advisable. I would like from the Minister, during the passage of this legislation, some sense of what the Government believe should be done. Of course, I understand that you do not set up a commission and then do everything for it. His default defence is that this is a matter for the commission. However, the Government must have some idea whether to go for the Henshaw model, which was strictly a commissioning body stripped down and doing nothing but arranging contracts and ensuring that they work, or whether to stay with a model that is more embedded in the public service. The department must have some view about that. It need not be a definitive or final view, but rather than leave all this with such a wide variation, with the potential to unsettle the confidence of the existing staff, at some stage we need a clearer idea of what the Government have in mind. I am prepared to be patient and to wait, but we shall need to press for further and better particulars under the heading of contracting out in future. I am content to leave it, unless the Minister wants to add anything.