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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

At the risk of delaying proceedings, I should like to raise a question. I may be missing something here, or I may just be being old-fashioned, but the liable relative rule is about to be extinguished in a way that we need to be careful about. I am grateful to Professor Nick Wikeley of the University of Southampton for drawing this to my attention but these conclusions are entirely mine. There is a danger—I put it no higher than that—that Clause 42 will send out a signal that in future child maintenance will be purely a private matter and that the state will have no residual interest in whether it is paid. That is an extreme way of putting it, and I shall explain why I think that we have to guard against that message taking hold and becoming the conventional wisdom. In social security law, there has always been, as far back as the Poor Relief Act 1601, a public duty to maintain children. That is well understood. Close kin, as defined in the public laws, were always considered to be the primary source of support for their relatives in times of hardship. In recent times, the National Assistance Act 1948 enshrined that public law duty in Section 42, which clearly sets a duty on spouses to support each other and to maintain children. That provision was encapsulated in Section 105 of the Social Security Administration Act 1992. There is a public law duty for spouses and civil partners to maintain each other and for parents to maintain children. The Committee has to understand this afternoon that Clause 42 proposes to substitute a new Section 105(3) in the Social Security Administration Act 1992 that will extinguish, as I understand it, the public law duty to maintain children. It folds the responsibility for the maintenance of children back into Section 1(1) of the 1991 Act, the parent Act of the Bill in front of us, which states: "““For the purposes of this Act, each parent of a qualifying child is responsible for maintaining him””." Section 6 brings a new opportunity to have options and make choices. It is therefore perfectly possible—indeed, it is anticipated—that repealing Section 6 will remove the public duty. People will then be able to pursue maintenance for children through the CMEC system. There is the question of ex-partners—it is not likely to be a big problem in practice, because I do not think that there are many ex-partners who are really well provided for—but, if we lose the opportunity under the old liable relative provisions to pursue people who do not maintain their children, and if they leave their partner, have an income and do not opt into the system and the parent with care does not require them to go into the CMEC system, then in the new scheme the state could have no come-back if the parent with care opted out for a quiet life. You could characterise this as taxpayers providing open-ended, means-tested support via child tax credit, income support and, pro tem, child benefit support for children. In the long term, we could end up with no way of attaching a liability to people under the former liable relative rules that we had. That is a fundamental change in the principles of social security law. There are some consistency issues about other parts of social security law. If we are going down this route, a consistent policy would mean that all public law maintenance obligations should be repealed. There are some inelegancies with pension credit because that is nothing more than income support for people over a certain age threshold. I notice with interest that Clause 35 of the Health and Social Care Bill repeals Section 43 of the National Assistance Act 1948, which deals with local authorities’ ability to recover liable relatives’ costs for residential and social care. Clause 42 is not a mere consequence of, and natural development from, the abolition of Section 6. We should not pass it without being very careful that we understand what we are doing. I may be reading too much into this and my interpretation may not be right, but I would like some reassurances from the Minister—if not today, then by letter or in some other way—that at some stage in the future the Public Accounts Committee and the Comptroller and Auditor-General will not suddenly realise that some non-resident parents will be beyond his reach in terms of maintenance of children and liable relatives using the body of social security law that we have enjoyed in the past. We need to be careful if we pass this clause, as we undoubtedly will, that we do so in that knowledge. The Minister must assure us that these things have been carefully thought through and that this will not come back and haunt us in the future as a mistake because we were not aware of the full consequences of Clause 42.