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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, for the amendment. The clause to which he attached it focuses on something slightly different from the issue of shared care arrangements. I shall deal with that first and then try to pick up some of the points made about shared care. Currently, there are no specific measures to cater for cases where there is split care. Where both the mother and father apply for maintenance, the Child Support Agency makes two maintenance calculations, and maintenance is collected from both parents. That is a situation in which one parent has one or more of the children but the other parent also has one or more of the children, so they are both parents with care and non-resident parents. At the moment two calculations are done. This is clearly not the best use of resources. It also leads to complaints in cases where the agency struggles to collect maintenance from one parent, particularly if they are the one with the higher liability. Clause 35 will allow for the offsetting of maintenance liabilities between the two parents, so that only the parent with the highest liability will actually make a payment. This will be a more efficient use of resources as there will be only one maintenance liability to collect. It will also make more sense to the parents. This measure is part of a package designed to simplify the assessment process in the future scheme. However, if the costs incurred by both parents in caring for their children were to be taken into account in the maintenance liability—whether there was split care as provided for by this clause or otherwise—that would lead to more complexity, which would contradict what we are trying to achieve. The process of working out maintenance is not designed to take account of the individual costs of raising children. It would be extremely difficult to arrive at such a figure which takes account of individual circumstances; for example, differing levels of income. Amendment No. 196 would also create scope for disputes between parents. For example, they might not agree on the amount of money the other parent said they were spending on the child. They would also have to provide evidence of such costs, and experience has shown the difficulties currently experienced by parents when trying to agree what level of shared care is being carried out. I can return to the issue of shared care, which we debated in a previous sitting. My noble friend Lady Hollis is right that the formula that we are taking forward is the current arrangement. There are some administrative changes to it to make it less likely that there will be a whole flow of changes of circumstances which have to be taken into account. We arrived at the conclusion by having extensive discussions with stakeholders about what alternatives there might be as regards reflecting shared care. Basically there was no consensus, but a whole range of views. On balance, we thought that there was no imperative to change the current arrangements, which is why we are where we are. My noble friend is again correct—it is right to reflect that there are clearly some costs and provision of facilities involved if shared care is to be encouraged. I do not think raising the threshold is the right way to proceed. Administratively, what we are doing is trying to get parents up front to agree the band of shared care that would operate, so that that can be built in early into an assessment. One of the problems with the current system is that disputes over levels of shared care and constant change, particularly around some margins, prevent early or speedy assessment and give rise to a good deal of disruptive and continual change to assessments. Administratively, we are trying to move away from that. In essence, this clause, which the noble Lord sought to amend, is not focused on shared care; it is concerned with split care and the ability to offset, so just the higher of the maintenance assessments has to be involved—just a payment one way. I hope on that basis that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment.