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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I am most grateful to my noble friend for making exactly the same point as I was going make. If you are not going to use the tax basis, what basis will you use? We also need to be careful about damning all the self-employed as wanting to do all that they can to rip off the taxman and parents with care. Yes, there are different bases of calculation for the self-employed and the employed in some respects, but if we substitute that, we would need a whole raft of detailed rules. Then, as my noble friend says, how on earth could we police that effectively? Curiously, in some respects, spouses or former spouses may be in a slightly better position in relation to some self-employed people to understand the arithmetic of the calculation, because often—I need to be careful about straying on to the employment of spouses in this context—they are possessed of an understanding that is broader than might otherwise be the case. If we move away from HMRC as a starting point, we will be in great difficulty. Somehow suggesting that our calculation is different from that which the Revenue would accept cannot be right.