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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

In the example outlined by the noble Lord, would he accept that, inevitably, in relation to a settlement through the court, advice would have been available to the parent with care, the non-resident parent and the court and that that advice would have been given in the shadow of the statutory system and the amount of maintenance available under that system? Generally, one would expect that to be factored into the overall arrangement. It seems to me that that does not preclude capital being part of the settlement. We are talking about child maintenance and not espousal maintenance arising from a divorce or separation. In a sense, I do not see the problem. If there is an awareness of the statutory system being available and an awareness of what that system would produce—indeed the awareness of what the statutory system would produce should be much easier to calculate on the new basis because there will be a ready-reckoner via the information and support service—the information that will be taken into account in that calculation will be clearly and swiftly obtainable, particularly if we recognise sharing information between the commission and the court. I do not see why the noble Lord has a problem with that. It may well be that parents will end up in different situations, but the key is doing that in the shadow of what the statutory system would produce, which seems to me to be the right way to proceed.