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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

Could I explain my hesitations about the noble Lord’s amendment? As a probing amendment it is to be welcomed, because it will be interesting to see how the provisions have worked. But may I take him back a stage and explain about the 12-month rule? When we were looking at the CSA provisions for the 2000 Act, representations were made about the difficulty of having a sensible relationship between the CSA and the court system, and the degree of possible churning. Lawyers were sometimes altering the financial support between the parent with care and the children to minimise those obligations and, as the noble Lord rightly said, playing around with issues about capital and income. After meeting with senior judges, including someone who is now a Law Lord, it was felt that, if we could produce a formula, lawyers on both sides would come to an agreement about the appropriate level of child support within the court. The phrase that we used was ““in the shadow of the CSA””. In other words, they would know that there was a presumption in favour of what was then, in terms of net, 15 per cent for the first child and so forth. Obviously, with consent that could be varied, and would be for issues such as school fees—always one of the biggies—or adjustments in the arrangements of who stayed with whom. We were asked to include the 12-month ruling because it would provide steadiness. For 12 months after the court settlement, things could bed down and there would be no immediate return to the court under ever-changing arguments. After that 12 months, provided that you gave the other party two months’ notice, you could return to the court to vary the arrangements. The two months’ notice was to make sure that solicitors and lawyers on both sides could see whether they could resolve the disputed issue—whether appropriate payments for school fees or whatever—between themselves without formally going back to the court to ask for a new ordnance on the level of child support. That scheme was carefully contrived with the support of lawyers because people pass between the benefit and the non-benefit systems. Clearly, the parent with care might want to benefit from the CSA and then may want to come off CSA and move to voluntary payments. We wanted consistency with consent for the lawyers to use. I was assured by lawyers and solicitors at the time that they thought that it was a sensible way forward. The noble Lord may have evidence which I have not so far seen in the public domain that this has produced some hard cases. In that case, it is obviously right to look at it again. However, the purpose was to try to get voluntary agreements within the framework of the CSA, with a time limit of 12 months to get some stability and two months to give notice to give those parents with care who might cycle between the voluntary and involuntary systems some degree of consistency. It could be argued that, if we are now going to adopt a voluntary system across the board, consistency may be less important. I would argue that it is actually more important, but that is the background. I welcome this as a probing amendment, but I hope that it does not trigger a change in policy unless there is evidence for one. For every hard case we may see, the provision has allowed some stability and a structured response to the needs of children whose position would otherwise be much more precarious.