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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I understand that Amendment No. 51, which makes conditional the commission’s powers to charge fees on its performance record, was drafted by the Law Society of Scotland. It is a rather sensible amendment, because it prevents the commission xharging fees until it is properly up and running and has proved itself as a body that is both efficient and effective. The Minister must surely agree that if a failing body starts demanding fees from parents it will do considerable damage to the reputation of the British system’s ability to provide and protect. More pertinently, is it fair to charge parents for a service that is not being adequately delivered? Amendment No. 52 and the question of whether Clause 6 should stand part of the Bill look to me to be probing. Our worry from this side of the Committee is much the same as that registered by the noble Lord, Lord Addington. We know very little about these fees, such as how much and, indeed, even more importantly, what are they for? These questions could go on and on and Clause 6 does not answer them. My Amendment No. 52 is an attempt to learn in a bit more detail from the Minister—if he can give it this time, promptly—what are these fees that are not related to costs? I realise that every instance cannot be spelt out, but surely we need some precedent to act as a safeguard against the commission unreasonably charging the parents to come to it for help. Amendment No. 53 would bar the charging of fees for parents with care who wish to use the statutory scheme. Sir David Henshaw’s original plans for child support reform envisaged the use of fees as a way of disincentivising parents from using the statutory scheme and thereby encouraging involuntary arrangements. As I mentioned earlier, this Bill persistently places voluntary arrangements over statutory schemes. I do not agree with this; I think that the situation should be pari passu. The Bill does not recognise that there is a significant number of non-resident parents who will avoid paying maintenance until they realise that the parent with care will bring in the state to enforce this obligation. The state is invaluable as the bailiff, as it were, for the parent with care, when they have nobody to turn to, and it is naïve and over-optimistic to think that voluntary agreements are always possible. Why seek to deter a parent from using what is clearly going to be—or at least we all hope that it will be—a very valuable service indeed. The Minister—and I think that it was the noble Lord, Lord Bach, the same Minister as we have here today, although my memory may again be faulty as it has been shown to be already this afternoon—gave evidence in one of the first two evidence sessions in July of the Select Committee studying this Bill in another place. He said that the thinking behind charging is not to use the system unnecessarily if it can be avoided and if it is not appropriate. It is not a direct quote, because there is a gap in the middle, but I hope that it is a fair summary of what he intended to say even if he did not actually say it. In his rose-tinted world of child maintenance, the noble Lord ignores the possibility or rather the likelihood that there may be a conflict of view between the non-resident parent and the parent with care regarding the former’s willingness to pay child maintenance and whether he will pay amounts on a regular basis. The recent DWP report supports that argument really rather clearly. The Survey of Relationship Breakdown and Child Maintenance: Interim Report, which has already been referred to in debates—DWP research report No. 468—documented that while 54 per cent of non-resident parents using the CSA thought parents should make voluntary child maintenance arrangements, only 22 per cent of parents with care using the CSA thought the same thing. There are clearly two different views there, and those differences are going to be reflected in reality and what actually happens on the ground. There is even more reinforcement in the report going on to say that the 54 per cent of parents with care using the CSA thought that child maintenance should be arranged by a government agency, compared to only 28 per cent of non-resident parents. We should not be shy of recognising that it is often, although not always, the parent with care who struggles financially and emotionally with the duty of looking after their child. This amendment is appropriate because it makes the statutory system a viable option for those with no real alternative. That is how I would like to look at things.