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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

moved Amendment No. 15: 15: Schedule 4, page 71, line 38, leave out paragraph 6 The noble Lord said: My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendments Nos. 16 and 17. The current formula for the payment of child maintenance provides for a reduction in child maintenance if the non-resident parent has overnight contact. The amount payable is decreased by one-seventh for one night a week, by two-sevenths for two nights a week, by three-sevenths for three nights and by half for four nights or more. For each night, therefore, that a child stays with a non-resident parent—worked out, incidentally, by an average over a 12-month period—child maintenance liability is reduced by one-seventh. In practice, this means that, unlike under the rules that applied in the family courts, there is a strong financial link between the amount of contact and the amount of maintenance paid. Having greater shared care means reduced child maintenance liability for the non-resident parent on the one hand and less child maintenance for the parent with care on the other. Predictably, this can lead to disputes over contact arrangements, particularly where there is already conflict and mistrust between parents. I seek in these amendments to ask the Minister whether he believes that the Bill addresses the real issue, because I do not think that it does. For me, the real issue is that these provisions encourage parents to associate the level of child maintenance payments with the amount of staying contact—for want of a better expression—that a child has with the other parent. The parents are placed in immediate financial conflict with each other, with the parent with care tempted to minimise overnight contact so as to maximise their maintenance payments and the non-resident parent seeking to maximise contact so as to minimise the child support maintenance payments. As such, there is a complete manipulation of what should be considered the natural contact arrangements between a parent and a child. I am told that contact applications at court are often less about what contact should or should not take place and more about the impact on either parent of child maintenance payment responsibilities. The courts have always strongly and quite rightly discouraged the association of child maintenance payments with contact. The present shared care provisions completely undermine this principle and encourage both mothers and fathers to connect these two issues. It is inconsistent to state that a parent’s obligation to maintain a child is not dependent on whether they have contact and then to provide in legislation, as we are, a provision that encourages parents to limit the amount of the contact that a non-resident parent has with a child in order to maintain a certain level of financial support. It is the children who are caught in this financial conflict between their parents and often their future relationship with a parent is detrimentally affected due to the argument over child support payments, which the legislation so inextricably links to contact. The current and proposed shared care provisions allow the parents to be motivated by financial, not welfare, considerations, which is not conducive for the family unit—a dispersed family unit certainly, but still a family unit of a sort. This detrimental impact on the family and the child outweighs any so-called benefits provided to either the parent with care or to the non-resident parent and, unless there is significant shared care, it should not impact on maintenance payments. On this basis, I should like to hear the Minister’s response to the suggestion of raising the shared care threshold, which would reduce the current financial conflict caused between the parents and children and allow the parents to deal with co-parenting without having to consider financial incentives for one or either parent. I beg to move.