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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

My Lords, I understand the point the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, makes about a tilt in one direction or another, but I want to start my few words on the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, by saying that it is not my practice to come into your Lordships’ House as the announcement of a Bill is made from the Woolsack. I had anticipated—indeed, I was not told any different, although I asked—that an hour for dinner-hour business would be the norm and therefore we would follow that procedure today. Clearly we have not; I was here just in time to hear the noble Lord’s opening remarks, and I am glad of that. I rather expected that the noble Lord would table Amendment No. 1 so that we could have a fairly extensive debate on the objectives of the commission. He rambled rather wider than that, I have to tell him, but I excuse him for that and I hope the Minister will too. I am not sure that it was entirely necessary, but the noble Lord himself has deemed it so. We are therefore retreading an extensive debate that we had at the opening of Committee. Given that the noble Lord has allowed these two amendments to be grouped, we ought to take them together. He is proposing to leave Clause 2(1) alone as it stands but to remove the whole of Clause 2(2) and replace it with the words, ““to encourage, in particular”” and so on, as on the Marshalled List. That would mean that the other two objectives would disappear. The Minister cannot want that. Regarding Amendment No. 2, we all agree that the child support system is still in a mess, even though I accept, like the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, that the operational improvement plan has made it less so in the past few months. None the less, it is your Lordships’ duty to see that the Bill sorts out the problem. I question whether the amendment offers anything better than what is already proposed. I did not read out the whole of the amendment, nor will I do so now, but irrespective of what we mean by ““maintenance””, which is the subject of the next group of amendments, surely the noble Lord’s proposal does very little that is new. Both amendments seek to ensure that more children will benefit from child maintenance payments. We all support that; it is the whole objective, first, of the CSA and, secondly, of the Bill and CMEC’s activities. Why it needs to be said twice is, I am afraid, beyond me. Perhaps the noble Lord could explain. It is the details that I object to. By seeking to turn the clock back to the making of applications for child support maintenance under the Child Support Act 1991, the amendment would hinder the new CMEC from emerging successfully from the mess I have described. The old CSA did not work because it forced the PWC to use the statutory maintenance system. The new CMEC is a response to that, in which the voluntary system is a viable alternative. I am sure that the noble Baroness the Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, rather; I am sorry, I am slightly out of date sometimes—is right in saying that the voluntary system could be significantly improved, but it is a major feature of the Bill. I agree with her that the Bill should therefore show no particular prejudice to either system, which the amendment does—there is no shadow of doubt about that. The statutory system is always open to parents regardless of whether they are in receipt of the jobseeker’s allowance. I am sure the Minister will agree that Amendment No. 2 is potentially harmful to the worthy objectives of the Bill.