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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I am grateful for these amendments being tabled because they give us an opportunity to talk about information-sharing arrangements between the commission and its clients. This group variously makes provisions to require the commission to gather and share the financial details of parents prior to and after the determination of an application to the commission, to safeguard the information held by the commission, and for the commission to produce details of payments. I agree with noble Lords that ensuring that information held by the commission is secure must be important and should be a key feature of the future scheme, and that in all cases appropriate information should be made available to parents. I expect the commission to treat these issues as a serious priority. Amendment No. 76 would compel the commission to provide parents with a statement of maintenance payments at three-monthly intervals following the determination of an application. That would include details of the maintenance liability, payments made and any arrears that had accrued during the period. The proposed new clause would require the commission to provide detailed information at prescribed intervals. That would place a burden on the new organisation before it had started, by effectively obliging the commission to set up a costly administrative process. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, asked whether the provision of routine statements would be provided for within the functionality of the current system. The functionality to produce quarterly statements is not included in PR1, although the agency is currently designing the requirement for enhanced client statements, which is planned to be included in a release later this year. We should also recognise that, for the longer term, the commission may want to explore other ways of providing parents with information about maintenance payments. One such option would be to provide parents with access to information via the internet, for example, just as you can sometimes get via your bank. I agree that that is too prescriptive for the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, but it is best practice to develop these arrangements so that information can be properly communicated to parents with care and non-resident parents.