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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for moving this amendment and for the manner in which he did it. This group variously makes provisions to increase the threshold at which shared care is taken into account in the maintenance calculation; removes the new rules proposed by the Government to aid in the administration of shared care; and requires the Secretary of State to publish a report, within 12 months of this Bill coming into force, reviewing the current shared-care rules. I am aware of the noble Lord’s concerns regarding the shared-care rules as they operate under the current schemes, and on the issue of the new shared-care provisions that this Bill will allow for. Therefore, I welcome this opportunity for debate, and recognise that the shared-care regime as it stands does not perfectly satisfy either parents with care or non-resident parents. However, I believe that the rules strike a reasonable balance between parents. Amendment No. 82 requires the Secretary of State to publish a report reviewing shared-care rules with a view to their abolition. Shared care is an issue with no unanimous view about the right way forward. The consultation on the child maintenance White Paper revealed little common ground among stakeholders as to what the rules should be. As such, existing rules will be carried forward largely unchanged, and there are no plans to depart from the basic rule that any reduction should be based on the number of nights a non-resident parent has their child with them. Obviously, as we have developed these and previous child maintenance proposals, we have fundamentally looked to uncouple issues of contact between parents and their children, recognising all the research and important information on engagement of non-resident parents with their children, as well as engagement with parents with care, with issues of child maintenance, notwithstanding the need to recognise that costs are involved if non-resident parents look after their children from time to time on one basis or another. We try to de-link those two issues of contact and maintenance. The rules that determine which parent should pay in a case of shared care are currently in regulations and will continue to be in the future scheme. If we decide to make any changes to the rules on shared care at the same time as we are introducing the first regulations for the new calculation rules, they will be made through the affirmative resolution procedure and therefore undergo scrutiny by Parliament. Such a report as suggested would therefore seem unnecessary. So there will be an opportunity to debate them. We have introduced a number of minor changes to the shared-care regime to help parents reach an ongoing agreement, which Amendment No. 89 seeks to remove—I understand that it is a probing amendment. These changes allow regulations to be made which would allow the commission to proceed with a maintenance calculation for a certain period on the basis of an assumption about the level of shared care if parents have not yet agreed what the level should be. In a range of discussions we had with stakeholders, it was represented to us that one problem in getting maintenance arrangements under way quickly was arguments about shared care. We looked administratively to see how we could cut through that problem. The proposal is that for the first six months of the case an interim decision will be made to give the parents the chance to reach a decision in their own time. At the end of the six-month period, if agreement has been reached, then that can be used as the basis for the adjustment of the maintenance calculation. If no agreement has been reached by that stage, then the reality of the existing shared-care arrangement can be used to determine the effect on liability. The aim is to help a pattern of shared care to be established that will provide a more accurate basis for the maintenance calculation. Removing those powers, as suggested by the amendment, would result in that not being possible.