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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

To be as clear as I can on this, it depends on the specific circumstances. If there is data coming from HMRC that has been returned by the employer, that data would be used in the assessment. If there is a variation request coming from the parent with care—we will come on later to the circumstances in which those might be facilitated—that would trigger an inquiry by the commission from a range of people, not precluding the NRP, as to more accurate data about income. That would be a circumstance in which there was an inquiry by the commission to the NRP, which should prompt a response. There might be other circumstances where, although we expect the HMRC returns to capture most of the data that we want—for example, if someone was self-employed and had been late with a self-assessment return, that information would not necessarily be available on as timely a basis as it might be for others—the commission would have the power to make inquiries of a range of people to seek to assess what income was appropriate. Those are the sort of circumstances in which requests might be made of the NRP and others and under which the NRP would be under an obligation to respond. If that response was inaccurate, deliberately or otherwise, and the commission’s inquiries identified that, that would be adjusted. The basic starting point here would routinely be HMRC data.