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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for giving way. I realise that this is the Report stage but it seems such a long time ago since we were in Committee. My concern still is on the declaration by the lone parent. My noble friend rightly said that when a lone parent applies for income support or JSA they are required to declare other income. Actually, they do not. What we have done, because of the limited disregards allowed on income support, is send many lone parents, wittingly or unwittingly, into the grey economy of undeclared income, also known as fraud. Certainly all the research on fraud shows that after men who do not declare income while claiming JSA and housing benefit fraud, where several people are claiming from the same household with the connivance of the landlord, the third largest group is lone parents failing to declare. If we are not careful we will build into the maintenance system the same kind of grey fraud area that we have in undeclared earnings of lone parents. We should do everything we can to build fraud out of benefit systems and not into them. My noble friend risks building more potential for fraud into the system.