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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, for moving this amendment, which gives us a chance to talk a little about shared care. I should say up front that I disagree with his analysis. We have always been clear about not linking contact with maintenance. It would be wrong to link those inextricably. Shared care arrangements do not do that. Notwithstanding the fact that there is no inextricable link, which is right, the opportunity to have some financial adjustment to recognise the cost that a non-resident parent might incur in having contact with their children is reasonable. The noble Lord’s amendment is more to do with the new arrangements in the Bill for the administration of shared care decisions. Currently it is often difficult for agency staff to decide cases where care is shared because the level of care undertaken by the non-resident parent is disputed, or because evidence provided by the parents is of poor quality or conflicting. There are also many cases in which parents have only recently separated and have yet to decide on care arrangements for the children, so paragraphs 6 to 8 are intended to improve the administration of such cases. We know that as many as a fifth of cases on the 2003 scheme have an adjustment for shared care, so these issues affect a significant proportion of the case load. It is a significant issue. Paragraphs 6 and 7 are intended to allow the commission to look forward as well as backwards in deciding what shared care reduction will be appropriate. This means, for example, that if both parents agree about the level of shared care that is expected, the commission can easily make an assessment based on that agreement. This will usually be administratively more straightforward for the commission than the current position, which requires the agency to obtain and assess hard evidence about the level of shared care in the past period, which is often as long as a year. Paragraph 8 will provide regulations that allow the commission to make a maintenance calculation on the basis of an assumption as to the level of shared care. This will apply only when parents agree to share care but have not yet agreed on its frequency and there is no current or past pattern of care on which the decision can be based. The detailed rules will be set out in affirmative regulations, so there will be an opportunity for further debate on this subject and for the commission to consider them. However, our current intention is that the assumption will be that care is shared for an average of one night a week, which is the level required to prompt the lowest reduction in maintenance—a seventh. That is the most common level of reduction allowed for shared care and the assumption will remain in place for a period of up to six months. If, during or at the end of the six-month period, an agreement on the frequency of care has been reached, that will be used as the basis for an ongoing adjustment to the maintenance calculation. If no agreement has been reached at the end of the six-month period, evidence of shared care from that six-month period will be used. If Amendments Nos. 15 to 17 were accepted, the improvements provided by these provisions would be lost. It would also mean that recognition of shared care in certain cases could potentially be prevented until the first annual review of the case. We are fully aware that shared care is a contentious issue that attracts strong views. However, the consultation on the White Paper revealed no consensus among stakeholders for any change. Therefore, our current intention is that the shared care rules should remain largely unchanged. However, we will continue to examine the rules regarding cases of equal shared care and we wish to involve the commission in deciding the best way of proceeding. Perhaps I may emphasise to the noble Lord that we had a lot of discussion with stakeholders about what the appropriate approach to shared care should be. Some stakeholders who represented parents with care said that there should be no adjustment, whereas other parents said that there should be much more significant adjustments. In the end, we determined fundamentally just to carry forward the provisions that have broadly operated since 2003. Equal care will be kept under review, in particular, although I think that it is a small percentage of the total case load and it is quite possible that, in these cases, voluntary agreements are entered into in any event. These matters can be dealt with by regulation in due course, but the particular changes that we are making are administrative to make it easier to enter into shared care arrangements. The current broad arrangement for shared care is not unreasonable. Because there was no compelling evidence or submissions that took us in a different direction, that is where we ended up. However, I hang on to the point that I started with, which is that we do not wish to preserve in the Bill or as part of the arrangements the linking of maintenance and contact. Nevertheless, we need to recognise that contact involves costs and there should be a reasonable reflection of that. I hope that that will satisfy the noble Lord and he will feel able to withdraw the amendment.