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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I have three or four amendments in my name and that of my noble friend dealing with Clauses 26 to 28 stand part and Amendment No. 187. I can dispose of Amendment No. 187 expeditiously. The Committee may know this, but it may be worth asking a couple of questions about the difficulty of enforcement of some of these maintenance payments in arrears in the United Kingdom. In a previous incarnation as a country solicitor in Scotland, I always found it immensely difficult to get hold of people to enforce a matrimonial aliment and other orders if the absent father left the jurisdiction of the court. Under the Maintenance Orders (Reciprocal Enforcement) Act 1972 it was certainly possible to enforce a maintenance order made by the UK courts on behalf of a UK resident, and it had to be registered because of the procedure involved. That can eventually be deployed in courts in other countries. It is a complicated process. It is known as the REMO procedure and a CSA website gives helpful details of it. It is cumbersome and difficult. There are two hopeful signs on the legal horizon. The first is that the Hague convention looked at this in November 2007 and a new global convention on international recovery of child support and other forms of family maintenance was finalised. That new Hague convention was intended to provide a much reduced bureaucracy—a swift, cost-effective more accessible and fair procedure—to allow international recovery. The convention was signed by the United States immediately. I think that it is expected that the European Union, through the Commission, will commit all EU countries to the convention shortly. I understand that the European Union has looked at this matter separately. I know a little bit about it because I sit on your Lordships’ Sub-Committee G, which looks at social policy. In 2004, the Commission published a Green Paper on this matter. In 2005, it published an impact assessment to look at different options. The aim is to replace the diverse provisions that underpin reciprocal arrangements between EU countries with a specific regulation that deals with international maintenance cases. Will the Minister confirm that Britain intends to sign up to the new Hague convention and, if so, when will CMEC and its client group be able to take advantage of its provisions? Will he confirm that the European Union is likely to agree with a specific Council regulation? More generally, what additional steps can the Government take to allow child maintenance orders under the CMEC provisions to be directly enforced abroad? In this global day and age, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that this will become an even bigger problem than it has been in the past, as foreign travel and people’s movements around the globe become more extensive and prolific. Perhaps I may say a few words about Clauses 26, 27 and 28, which relate to curfew orders, prison provision and driving licences. These penalties are now more or less discredited. Curfew orders are a nugatory waste of space, time and effort. They will provoke non-resident parents who set their face against the Act to look for curfew orders, which will not in any way, shape or form be a deterrent. I can understand that they give comfort to the red-top, tabloid press, which will say that the Government are being tough on deadbeat dads and other such nonsense, but they are a distraction and discredit the proper work of the commission, which is to get money out of non-resident parents if they refuse to pay or delay in doing so. Curfew orders create much administrative distraction and displacement of activity. In the court of public opinion—let us disregard human rights challenges under the European convention—they are more trouble than they are worth. The same is true of prison provision. As with curfew orders, putting people in jail costs the taxpayer extra money, but it gets no extra money for the parent with care. It does not affect liability positively for anyone. I would be much happier if we removed the provision for imprisoning people for these offences and concentrated on some of the important improvements that the Government are making, such as attacking joint accounts. It is important to concentrate on what produces money, what avoids human rights legislation cases and the core activity of the commission. It is my experience that, if one takes away someone’s driving licence, they just drive anyway, which has perverse consequences for those who have accidents because that person is driving uninsured. I do not have evidence or figures for that. It is always easy to say of the enforcement powers in the three clauses, ““Well, the Government or the commission will have them available. They are always a prospective threat and that might make people a bit more responsive to their duties and legal responsibilities””. For my money, I would rather we had a cut-down, nuts and bolts, reduced revision of the way we attack sources of money, because the public perfectly well understand that if money is owed, you attack the money source. People find it difficult to understand why people are sent to jail at vast cost, even if it is only for a short time. Never mind the high principle of human rights; from a practical point of view, this is a distraction and it does not work. I am very sceptical about it. We should do something else with the time of the staff in order to realise money for parents with care. I hope that the Government will think carefully about this.