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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I hope that I can rise to that challenge. This is an important group of amendments. I agree with the noble Lord that we are at one in spirit on this. The amendments in my name and that of my noble friend are all probing, but they all deal with how we calculate some of these assessments and how we deal with evasion and inaccurate assessments. Amendment No. 92 was run in the Public Bill Committee in the House of Commons. It allows the commission in the case of self-employed non-resident parents who own a limited company or a share in one or are company directors to immediately presume a basic level of income. Based on my experience in a previous incarnation of doing casework, it was almost the biggest problem facing parents with care that they were unable when the non-resident parents were self-employed to get any real appreciation of the realistic income available to non-resident parents. Therefore, the amendments try to deal with that in a more expeditious and grown-up way. The old scheme certainly gave an enormous amount of wriggle-room to non-resident parents, especially if they were self-employed or had income of other sorts, such as rental income. The level of ingenuity possible to those people under the first scheme, set up and introduced in 1993, was limitless. It never ceased to amaze me, the ingenuity that could be brought to bear by self-employed people who could lose or conceal their real income and wealth and the assets available to them. They went to any number of lengths—quite extraordinary lengths—because of the heat generation between the two sets of parents, who were often very angry and distressed. People were just playing games with one another in a way that made it impossible for the professionals in the agency to deal with the situation rationally. In the new situation, we must look at self-employed non-resident parents in a different light altogether. Amendment No. 190 proposes a general catch-all anti-evasion clause. If I had only one pick from the amendments in this group I would go for that one. In the early days, there used to be a catch-all provision to deal with evasion, which got lost in the 1995 and 2000 legislation changes. I do not care how the provision is cast; the wording may be wrong and it may be technically incompetent, but it must be possible to have such a provision. It is right that we consider some kind of residual, catch-all, back-up, anti-evasion provision that people can take advantage of where, in their heart of hearts, they believe that they are being given the run-around by a self-employed non-resident parent who has all the power and potential of concealing income in every which way. In my experience, there were websites that shared information about how best to do so; it was a joke. Those members of the non-resident parent client group were not representative, but a lot of them were being driven to distraction by the way in which the system bore down on them. There was no excuse for the way in which they were behaving. Some of them were deliberately flaunting the authority of the agency and doing so on websites in a way that was not only inimical to the parent with care but to the long-term interests of the child involved. Some consideration of putting something in the Bill that strengthens the new CMEC commission establishment to deal with anti-evasion in a way that is more robust is sensible. Amendment No. 93, which goes as far as deeming an income, might seem extreme, and the amendment may be technically incompetent, but that is a way that can be found to set in legislation an ability to take the initiative, get the assessment done and then face down a non-resident parent and say that if the deemed income is not right they have the ability to get it right by putting the facts of the case fully, squarely and openly in front of the commission and the parent with care. Amendment No. 95 concerns avoidance, which we have dealt with. Taken together with Amendment No. 190, it creates a general power to deal with evasion. There is a well-established rule in Scots law, and there was an earlier presumption against the alienation of assets in the social security and benefit Acts that dealt in the old supplementary benefit schemes with people gratuitously alienating assets and that being taken into account, and the system having some remedy against that where it is clearly being done in bad faith to try to elide responsibilities and duties. This is an important group of amendments. I concur with what the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, said. If this is not technically the right way of doing this, the Minister would be well advised to think carefully about whether there is some other way of achieving the ends that are set out in this group.