---

Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I dissociate myself from the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. If someone is in regular employment and there are money resources, the situation is straightforward. You can put a direct debit on the account via the employer and get the money. The problem arises with the self-employed and those with no money resources. That happens with the young, the feckless, those who change jobs rapidly and so on. How do we make the sanctions bite if there are no financial resources on which to do so? No one wants to take a passport away, no one wants to take a driving licence away and certainly no one wants to see someone go to prison. I presume that we would all much prefer to see community sentences and the like. But there have to be sanctions if even the statutory system is not to be voluntary, let alone to allow the voluntary system to remain in effect. The difficulty is that those who are reluctant to pay and fail to do so are often precisely those who do not own a house, so we cannot get a garnishee order; they do not have goods worth seizing, so bailiffs cannot be used; and they are not in regular, steady PAYE employment on which a direct debit can produce a flow of money. Where do you go except to the individual concerned? I agree absolutely with the noble Lord that no one wants to do this. It is counterintuitive to go for a prison order which stops him working, a curfew order which makes him angry or the removal of his driving licence which runs the risk of him driving uninsured. But if we do not have access to the individual’s financial resources, and with this difficult group we very often do not, where do we go, apart from saying that there are no sanctions to apply? That is why I hope that my noble friend will persist in this. I hope that the success of the new system and CMEC will mean that there will be no need to use these sanctions, but I believe that they are necessary as a back-up in order to get some non-resident parents to take their responsibilities seriously.