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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

This is a gigantic group of amendments, covering releases offered from bank accounts which may be either ongoing or lump sum. Indeed, they fall rather neatly into two halves. If CMEC is to have this power, any—any—account may be appropriate in certain circumstances. I originally thought that, by removing the word ““current”” in Amendments Nos. 111 and 112, the Minister was doing just that. However, as he said, further examination shows that the first half of Amendment No. 117 pushes the decision on which account is appropriate into secondary legislation in new Section 32(3A)(b). That pricked my interest, because delay is not necessarily the right thing to do. I assume that this statutory instrument—or series of statutory instruments, as appropriate—will produce the safeguards the Minister has been talking about. However, will current accounts be included or excluded? That is a fair question. On Amendment No. 120, the credit in a joint account clearly belongs to all the account holders. Would subsection (5)(a) not be better expressed by referring to ““account holder or holders””? I suggest this as a simplifying drafting amendment. Would that not cover all types of account, whether held by a single person or group of people? That is appropriate, because Amendment No. 121 says that all the account holders must be informed that money is to be withdrawn from the joint account due to the activities—in this case, the non-payment of maintenance—of one of them. The Minister clearly believes that this will put added pressure on the defaulter because the others will complain to him immediately. In general, he must be right. However, what about the non-resident parent in a new relationship, with or without children, with a joint account? Is it not likely that the other account holder—the new parent with care, although in this case it is a couple—will object strongly to the money being withdrawn? Would this not add substantially to the number of appeals? Amendment No. 124 adds to the pressure, as the deposit holder is allowed to take fees as it would for any other standing order. I assume that the Minister envisages that these amounts from the various accounts would be taken by standing order. The other account holders would be able to get at the defaulting non-resident parent in question. Amendment No.125 compounds this. As far as Amendment No. 127 goes, why is the deposit taker himself being allowed to go to appeal? I simply do not understand that. In Amendment No. 130, it is not appropriate to have a may/shall debate, but only to comment that if all these chances for the withdrawal of money from accounts are not in the Bill, they must—must—be in the statutory instrument. Amendment No. 134 is a sensible provision defining the parameters of the statutory instrument, although new subsection (1A)(a) is perhaps a little vague and my earlier comments apply. As far as I can see, all the new provisions in Clause 21 are duplicated in amendments to Clause 22, as I said at the beginning, which covers lump sum deduction orders, so the same questions apply. To save time, I am happy to allow the Minister’s answer to cover both clauses, unless he wants to give one that is pertinent to one clause and not to the other, although I doubt it. Amendment No. 156 deserves comment. It would be quite wrong if the account were to be stripped by the other account holder, and I hope that these two long amendments will prevent that. However, seven days’ grace is given before the maintenance due starts to be paid. This will give time for asset stripping so what will happen then, especially if it is done by the non-resident parent? Is this to be a criminal offence? I am afraid I do not understand the reason behind Amendment No. 164 and the removal of proposed new subsection (4), or, indeed, proposed new Section 32G(9). It may be my inattention to detail but why is it still needed? Is it because it duplicates earlier amendments? The same question applies to proposed new subsection (7) on page 16 in Amendment No. 167. I shall have to study the rationale for the other amendments but I hope it will not be necessary to return to this at a future stage of the Bill.