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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

moved Amendment No. 184: 184: Clause 30, page 32, line 37, after ““may,”” insert ““with the written consent of the parent with care,”” The noble Lord said: Since they were tabled, Amendments Nos. 184 and 185 have been addressed at least in part in the draft regulations, and I am grateful to the Minister for that. The draft regulations relating to Clauses 30 and 31 give some comfort in that the permission of the parent with care will need to be sought. The amendments have been tabled to see whether this provision should be in the Bill. On reflection, and having seen the draft regulations, they are probably enough. But if the Minister could say a word about how the consultation on the draft regulations is going and how the Government’s policy is developing in this area, that would be extremely helpful. On the other amendments in the group, and others to be moved by the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, Amendment No. 188 seeks to appoint inspectors, which harks back to the old days of the CSA when we aspired to having named officials looking after individual cases. It became clear quite early on that that aspiration could not be fulfilled because of the administrative burden that it would put on the organisation. I do not know what the policy is now, but it used to be possible to appoint inspectors, to invite them to do individual case work and to look at other things with which they were tasked. This is a probing amendment to see whether inspectors have any new role or any new dimension that could be deployed in the new set-up that is being rolled out with the new commission. Amendment No. 200 deals with trying to protect the interests of the child and the parent with care when it comes to interests and fees. Perhaps the Minister will say a word about that. I shall spend a moment or two on the issues that are raised by Clause 32, which causes me real concern. I listened to the discourse on the Minister’s evidence to the Commons Public Bill Committee and, reading between the lines, he was less than enthusiastic. His tone was guarded when he talked about whether Clause 32 would ever be resorted to. I have real concerns about the principle of parcelling up arrears and debts and sending them to people outside the public service to try to recover, as is envisaged in the clause as I read it. I understand the Henshaw principle behind privatisation and outsourcing, and if people can do things better than the public servants in the commission, I am certainly prepared to consider that. Clause 32, however, goes too far. The parents with care, whose debts might be parcelled up and handed out, would not be particularly comfortable with procedure either, although they might not know that much about it. Unless the privatisation of transferring arrears—bundling them up and parcelling them out—is going to become a core objective, there is a great danger that this will become an unpopular and, probably more importantly, unsuccessful part of the commission’s business compared with what can be done under existing public service arrangements. All the evidence that I have seen to date suggests that the private collection of debts is no better—indeed, it is arguably worse—than the efforts of existing Child Support Agency professionals who do this work. It is specialist work; it takes a lot of expertise, it requires a lot of careful work, and you have to be assiduous at working out the detail of pursuing people for arrears and outstanding debts. I fear in my heart that, if we let Clause 32 go and are not careful, it will create all sorts of difficulties which would not be sensible or useful. Unless the Government are going to make this a major new plank and encourage the commission to make it a major new way of dealing with things in the future, they should think again. On that basis, I beg to move.