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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, because, particularly on the last amendment, some of his questions on the underreporting of tax income had not occurred to me. I will be interested to hear how the Minister suggests the system will respond. In the past, it would have been regarded as part of the arrears to be paid, but I am unclear about what will happen now. I shall make a couple of brief comments on the other two amendments. Amendment No. 86 introduces a 2 per cent tolerance. The noble Lord has a point of substance. As I recall, it was the case that to the nearest penny it might be 78 per cent accurate, which was a remarkable figure, but to the nearest pound, it is was up to 95 per cent accurate. The problem was that if you went for the nearest penny you spent so much time doing the assessment that you did not spend enough time doing the enforcement. That was the concern: not to get sloppy accounting, but to get effort put where it mattered. It may be that my noble friend will be able to tell us that by going from net to gross income on one hand, and to tax data on the other, and from viewing the preceding year’s data, there will be almost no difference in staff input in assessing to the nearest penny and the nearest pound. I think that is quite possibly the case, in which case this problem should now go away. However, it has been a problem in the past and it is therefore worth exploring the issue. I have some sympathy with the second amendment about putting the requirement into regulations; not for the reasons which the noble Lord adduced, that we may want to change the percentages—as far as I can see the move from net to gross percentage is perfectly sane—but because one is never sure whether a case will go through the courts and possibly eventually to Europe. That may involve some unspecified form of income—it could be dividends or whatever—that has not come into the formula and may come back. We in Parliament are required to take this into account. In practical terms only, it may be much simpler to take account of any subsequent legal judgment, which will certainly follow any new system as the less content try to challenge it, through regulations than through primary legislation. Again, however, I am sure that my noble friend can reassure us to that effect.