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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, is absolutely right. The Minister is obviously right in saying that we will move to one statutory scheme, but we are creating one statutory scheme plus a voluntary scheme. Those in the voluntary scheme will have come out of two, possibly three, statutory schemes. We will substitute different complexities for those that we have now. Although the Minister has been helpful, I am still not persuaded of the appropriateness of the interface. Perhaps I may have one last go before I shut up on this and we perhaps revisit the issue in some other way. Let us assume that somebody is in the statutory scheme and remains in it. They have two children and receive 20 per cent of income net. Under a new case in the voluntary scheme, as the Minister said, they would be entitled to approximately 8 per cent or one-third of the other’s total liability of 25 per cent. Under that new, voluntary case, they would have to know not only the other’s income but also all the details of the existing case on the statutory system to be aware that they were entitled not to 15 per cent net, which they might recently have thought if they were the only case, but to 8 per cent net because an existing case was on the statutory system, which they, being voluntary, had no way of knowing about or accessing. The second family, in the voluntary scheme, may well get short-changed because of a lack of knowledge and bargaining power in the equation. Let us take a second case as an example. It is a brand-new case coming into the voluntary system. One child is involved and the non-resident parent agrees the equivalent of 15 per cent. That is fine and everybody is very happy. There then comes a second child in the voluntary system. The first person asks, ““What is going to happen?””. Are the two women expected to get together over a cup of tea and divvy up the money? How will each of them know what they can reasonably ask from the non-resident parent without them knowing about the other and what the other is getting? There are real problems with the alignment of a voluntary system with a statutory one and with the alignment of one voluntary system with another. I absolutely agree that in many cases there is no problem with there being a single, one-off voluntary system where there is an agreement to pay. However, the moment you move beyond that—we saw this with all the problems with the old CSA—we are simply substituting different sorts of complexity, without the parent with care necessarily being able to have formal knowledge based on what the statutory bodies have collected from her.