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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

moved Amendment No. 13: 13: Clause 15, leave out Clause 15 The noble Lord said: My Lords, Amendment No. 13 stands in my name and in the name of my noble friend Lord Addington. Amendment No. 14 is also in the group. Taken together, they are an attempt by myself and my noble friend to ask the House to consider what might happen if the hope and expectation that has been driving the policy changes in the Bill do not come to fruition and the situation does not improve. Amendments Nos. 13 and 14 would make conditional the abolition of Section 6 of the Child Support Act 1991, which requires all parents with care who are claiming benefit to claim child support at the same time. The lifting of the Section 6 requirement would be subjected to a review after three years, in 2011. That review would be laid before Parliament and would have to establish, in respect of parents with care on benefit, whether their position in relation to the adequacy of the child maintenance they were receiving had improved, deteriorated or remained the same. If their position had demonstrably deteriorated after a three-year period, the obligation to use the statutory maintenance system as a condition of receiving income support or income-related jobseeker’s allowance would be reinstated. The Minister is aware of the provenance of the amendment. Some of us following the proceedings of the Bill have become increasingly worried about how the abolition of Section 6 will work. The amendment is set against the background of a department that rightly will concentrate over the next few years on child poverty. One of the two indicators by which the department will measure progress is the number of children benefiting from child maintenance. This is a key factor in the Government’s policy, as well as a concern to Members of this House. I start by shading in some numbers that we are talking about. I refer the House to the Child Support Agency Quarterly Summary Statistics: March 2008. Table 13.1 deals with the percentage of cases where the parents with care on income support or jobseeker’s allowance have a positive maintenance income. The figures are revealing. The overall agency figures for the latest date available, May 2007, show that there were 441,000 assessed cases, of which only 156,000, or 36 per cent, had a positive maintenance outcome and received benefit. Footnote 2 on that table is instructive. The first sentence states: "““The Child Support Agency’s PSA target was to ‘double the proportion of parents with care on Income Support or Income-Based Jobseeker's Allowance who receive maintenance for their children to 60 per cent by March 2006’ ””." I repeat, "““60 per cent by March 2006””." That table, produced in March 2008, indicates that in May 2007 that figure was 36 per cent. There is a long way to go. Obviously, some of the changes that the Government are making will help, such as the proposal to increase the disregard for maintenance to £40 per week in 2010. I hope that that helps. The Government are bringing in a new information and support service for parents with care and I hope that that helps, too—I am sure that it will. However, there is a risk—I put it no higher than that—that the maintenance available to parents with care on benefit after Section 6 is abolished might actually get worse. We also need to look at the numbers of people who are eligible to receive child maintenance in Britain. We know from the Government’s own figures published by the department in December 2006, A New System of Child Maintenance, Cm 6979, that around 2.5 million parents were eligible to receive child maintenance in the UK. We know that 49 per cent have no child maintenance arrangements at all, 19 per cent use the Child Support Agency and 23 per cent have private arrangements. That is the current breakdown as assessed by the Government. The department carried out some research on those not using the Child Support Agency. The recently published study by Kazimirski and Ireland, Survey of Relationship Breakdown and Child Maintenance, interim DWP report No. 468, interestingly shows that of those eligible parents not using the Child Support Agency around a fifth, 22 per cent, said they preferred not to receive any child maintenance. More than a quarter, 29 per cent, said that they did not know where the non-resident parent was and a third said that, as far as they were concerned, the non-resident parent either could not afford to pay or would not pay any maintenance. These are difficult statistics and a lot of work has to be done. The information and support service that the Government are bringing forward has a huge job to do in trying to turn some of these figures around. On the other side of that issue, we know from departmental research that a third of parents with care on benefit have said that they feel confident or very confident that voluntary arrangements will work for them. That is good news and we hope that that figure will increase, but it is very important that the Government keep an eye on private maintenance arrangements made by those on benefit and monitor how satisfactory they are—not just in terms of the amount but the frequency and adequacy of the help that is provided to the children that the arrangements are designed to support. This amendment proposes that a report should be laid before Parliament in 2011. By that time the new commission will have had a chance to put its house in order and get some idea of how effective its new powers are. The amendment also seeks to establish the amounts being paid and with what regularity in order to enable the House, in three years’ time, to make a comparison with how the voluntary system that we are going into can be compared and contrasted with the statutory system that we are coming out of. In the event that fewer parents with care on benefit are receiving child maintenance compared with the position now, or that the average amount of child maintenance received per child is not increased over the next three years, there is arguably a case for reinstating the automatic use of the statutory maintenance system where parents with care claim income-related benefits. This is not a perfect solution. There are a lot of ways—this is the only one I could think of—of trying to put in some kind of review process, some kind of sunset clause, some sort of compulsion on the Government to ensure that they are watching very carefully what is happening under the new system so that it is not the poorer families who suffer most should things not go according to plan. I beg to move.