---

Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

It may well be too long. People get frightened by the technicalities of these important subjects. I point to the contributions that have been made during the passage of the Bill through both Houses. The number of people taking part in the debates is getting smaller, and the speakers who are not on the Public Bill Committee or party spokesmen could be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Therefore, there is value in having an independent interlocutor, without any axes to grind but with a great deal of expertise and knowledge in the field and access to a sophisticated network of stakeholders. That interlocutor can bring to bear corporate knowledge and experience built up over many years that shine light on and elucidate the finer points of some of the technical policy in the relegations. That will be the case when the commission is set up. It will set regulations. Indeed, the Minister has been hiding behind the commission with aplomb—probably rightly in many cases because it will be left to the commission to be successful in its own way of doing things. But I think that the commission will need to bring forward regulations and the department will need to sponsor the regulations. I for one would have an awful lot more confidence to look at the regulations as they come through, affirmative or negative as they may be, if they came with the seal of approval of an equivalent to the Social Security Advisory Committee—the child support advisory committee that would be set up in these amendments under consideration this afternoon. The other thing that a child support advisory committee would be able to do is to make occasional special reports, as of course the SSAC can and often does, to great effect. Those reports would be on subjects that the committee believed, having regard to its experience of oversight of policy, should be investigated. The SSAC did a very good report not that long ago about call centres and the problems for clients who accessed the benefits system via that route. There are lots of advantages to a committee that has a closer and more confident relationship with the department than the rest of the outside world—certainly opposition spokesmen—may have. It can anticipate problems and call attention to them and service an extensive network of stakeholders. So the proposition in front of the Committee is clear: we are asking for further help from people who would make it their business to study the development of the policy and the implementation and operation of the new work of CMEC as a commission, and help Parliament to digest its requests for secondary legislation. The idea is not new. It was mooted first by the then Social Security Select Committee in 1999 to 2000, in another place. There was an instructive recommendation in the 10th report, which came to the conclusion: "““We recommend that the Government should consider either extending the terms of reference of the Social Security Advisory Committee, or creating a Child Support Advisory Committee on similar lines, to scrutinise secondary legislation on child support, as part of the process of building public confidence in the new child support system””." The Government of the day set their face against that. The main reason, in so far as I could understand any reason at all, was that it would delay things, get in the way and take extra time—and there was a general nuisance value to any such committee. They decided that it would just make things harder and that the department had enough trouble without that. It may well slow down deliberation and may from time to time make life a little difficult for policy makers in the department, but my submission is that the value added by any such committee would far outweigh any drawbacks of that kind. Another thing that I could adduce in evidence in support of the case is that we are just beginning to understand how the Child Support Agency legislation is being interpreted by the courts. There are some cases that have gone all the way through the legal process. One was the Smith case, which went all the way through the courts, because of the ambiguities that existed in the primary and secondary legislation about whether capital allowance should be considered as assessable income. I am absolutely certain. Knowing what I do about the work done by the SSAC, I am absolutely certain that it would have picked up such an ambiguity before the case went anywhere near the Court of Appeal. The case cost a lot of time, money and agony for those involved in it. It is my submission that a committee set up to do that work would have signalled that potential fault and that it could have been addressed long before the difficulties that it caused. I turn briefly to the content of the amendments. It is a professional cut-and-paste job. I have just lifted the Social Security Advisory Committee provisions but those provisions have two things to which I should point. First, the Secretary of State can always override them, as he can under the SSAC rules, in an emergency or with the agreement of the committee if something goes wrong that needs to be fixed quickly. You can worry about the detail of the argument later. That is an important safety provision. That is enshrined in these amendments. If the new commission has any sense, it will encourage a network of stakeholders. There are plenty out there who I am sure are willing to help. It should seize the initiative and try to encourage them to come in. They could all play a part in the newly constituted committee that I recommend in this group of amendments. All the necessary groups are there and, I say in passing, particularly non-resident parents. I have been studying this area of public policy for as long as anyone and I know that there are organisations such as Fathers 4 Justice and so on which work very hard, but they have a much harder job making representations on behalf of that important client group. Any such committee set up under these amendments would play a prominent role, as far as I am concerned, in the makeup of the committee that did the work. In conclusion, for the additional level of assurance and the future operation and delivery of the new commission, this is a small price to pay in terms of extra administration and such extra bureaucracy that might be involved. I think it would give assurance to the client group which studies this policy area and it would give reassurance to parliamentarians that, when considering the regulations, they would be able to found them on some expert help that would guide them through the passing of the important secondary legislation that this primary legislation will provide for future consideration in Parliament. On that basis, I beg to move.