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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

My Lords, first, I apologise to the House. I have an unavoidable commitment which means I have to leave at 5 pm. My timing has been slightly thrown by the Statement. I wanted to speak to this amendment because there is much that is good in this Bill. My noble friend in particular, and officials more generally, are entirely right to congratulate themselves—I certainly wish to do so—on delivering from Her Majesty’s Treasury what my noble friend’s predecessors singularly failed to do; a decent maintenance disregard for new cases and a smaller but still welcome version for existing cases. All of that is terrific. If it works, more money will go to poorer children. That is what we are concerned about and we come to this issue with good will. The good effects of this on child poverty will be undermined by the new voluntarism, which remains unsafe. Why do we think that because many non-resident parents resist paying when it is a statutory duty, they are more likely to pay when it is voluntary—and to that extent, discretionary, and to that extent, optional? Let me put it bluntly. I fear that the wish of the commission to reduce its caseload will collude with the wish of NRPs to pay less—if at all—and the wish of parents with children to avoid hassle with their ex-partner and to take what is on offer. It is a win-win for everybody except for the one group that matters, which is children. Essentially, the Government are relying on the greater generosity of the disregard to encourage lone parents into pressing for maintenance within a voluntary system. I am not sure whether, in policy or psychological terms, that is sound. We had similar arguments many years ago about good cause. I was then urged by voluntary organisations to have generous exemptions for good causes such as violence. I now think, on reflection, that those voluntary organisations were wrong and I was wrong. All that did was promote bullying by some NRPs and threats of violence encouraged by some dreadful father’s groups—I will not call them fathers’ groups; they were men’s groups—to avoid the parents with children naming them and the Child Support Agency pursuing them. Of course, the best option is for the full sum to be paid reliably and voluntarily. If one can remove Section 6 and ensure nonetheless that that happens, that would be wonderful. I do not think that that will be the case. New fathers, particularly new fathers who are coming out of casual relationships where the parent with care tends to be on benefit, as opposed to divorced fathers who tend to have a long-standing commitment to their children, have to be educated into their financial responsibilities. For many of them it will be a grudging process. In fact their own mothers, the paternal grandmothers, may be the key to all of this. We seem to be so concerned to overcome the distinction between families on benefit and the families that are not and to establish a form of level playing field that we lose sight of what really matters, which is to ensure that mothers with care on benefit who have the greatest difficulty getting the maintenance that they are due will actually get it in future. My noble friend is relying on the information and advice service, but I hope that he is right to do so. I congratulate him on making it as robust as it seems to be but I fear that, over the years and under pressure, it will be one of the things within the DWP to go, in the same way that similar services have unfortunately withered. I believe that voluntarism should be a reward for steady payment from the NRP, not a risk that we appear to be taking on behalf of poor children. As my noble friend will know, I favour placing everyone on a statutory system and if, after one year, payment flows regularly, as a reward one can move on to voluntarism. That would mean that the lone parent would know what she was entitled to; there would be a year of experience in the pattern of payments; the direct debits and so on would be established; there would be an expectation of receiving the payment and taking it for granted; and the NRP would be likely to be co-operative in the hope of getting and retaining voluntary status. The lone parent would know that she could freely return to a statutory scheme when she was psychologically willing to do so. In other words, we would have conditional voluntarism. Ultimately, despite all the very good—indeed, wonderful—things that the Bill does for children, I am not persuaded that we have sufficiently built out the risk of going for pure voluntarism. I am not enthusiastic about the amendment because I do not think that it goes far enough, but it is better than nothing at all in the sense that it seeks to track whether money is flowing to children and whether the fears expressed today are warranted as regards the future. I hope that our fears are not validated, but how will we know?