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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, has raised an issue. I agree with him that in some cases parents may seek to maximise or minimise contact in order to affect their maintenance payments, and some non-resident fathers would be concerned that by seeing the child only during the day, when they may incur the cost of going to McDonald’s, the zoo or whatever, they would get no abatement of their maintenance because the child is not staying overnight. I accept that in some cases there can be a problem, but the noble Lord’s solution may be worse than the current situation. If we wish to encourage contact, it is undoubtedly right that as far as possible the child or children stay with the non-resident parent. Conventionally, that may be every other weekend and part of the school holidays. That means that the non-resident parent has to have enough space, the extra bedroom, the bunk beds, the change of clothes, the additional food, the pizzas and whatever that he will need to look after those children. The costs are incurred whether the children effectively stay four nights a week or every other weekend. There is an ongoing cost. Therefore it seemed right to abate some of the maintenance that he would otherwise pay, because he is incurring continuous costs however many nights the children stay. The question is then about what the appropriate abatement is, given that some of the money that he would otherwise pay to the parent with care for the maintenance of the child should be abated because he is incurring additional costs, even though her costs continue to flow. There is not a direct trade-off that by him spending money, she saves it; they both incur costs. It was thought inappropriate to go for the day, because there were the questions of when it started and finished and whether we started having bills of fare or tick-offs for cafeteria lunches as opposed to a picnic in the park. We went for overnight accommodation. My fear is that if we go back, as the noble Lord suggests, to a higher hurdle—104 nights a year or even higher—that will reduce the amount of contact the non-resident father is willing to engage in. From experience, every other weekend plus some of the holidays captures that 52- to 104-night window. If the noble Lord is saying that the non-resident parent must have the equivalent of at least 104 nights—two nights a week through the year—we will be asking many non-resident parents, often not in affluent circumstances, to incur real costs in having an extra bedroom in the flat, extra furnishings and so on with no abatement towards maintenance. In which case, unless there is already a very strong attachment, some of those non-resident parents will say, ““Why bother? I’ll just take them out during the day and won’t have them to stay overnight””. That may suit them, but if we want to ensure the bonds—particularly for young boys; if the parent with care has a series of new boyfriends it is very important that the boy continues to have contact with his natural father—I do not think that is helpful. While the noble Lord is right to say that there can be manipulation of the situation, the Government’s proposals, which largely reflect the existing situation, are the best achievable in circumstances where there are conflicting pressures and problems about who pays for what and when.