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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

My Lords, I did not mean to chide the noble Lord earlier; if it came across like that, I offer my apologies. A number of issues arise. We are carrying forward the one-seventh, two-seventh etc formula because it is the adjustment that would be made to maintenance arrangements. The administrative arrangements are about trying to determine whether we are talking about one, two or three nights a week. To date we have done that simply by looking back over what has happened in practice, generally over a period of a year, and sometimes over a more representative period. However, it is sometimes the subject of quite a lot of dispute, certainly when someone is close to the thresholds. The administrative arrangements seek to bypass some of those arguments at an early stage. The adoption of the one-seventh approach is our current thinking in circumstances where both parents agree that there is to be shared care but have not established a pattern or settled on what it will be. We want to reflect something in the assessment right from the start and the sensible way to achieve that is with the one-seventh calculation. It is the most common adjustment made when shared care is undertaken as part of an arrangement. On ongoing arrangements with stakeholders, as we have discussed, they have and will continue to have a wide range of views. There is an issue particularly about equal care and whether any adjustment should be made for it. That is something that the commission would particularly like to focus on at an early stage and keep under review, rather than some of the other issues around the formula. I hope that that has helped the noble Lord. I acknowledge that, if there are financial adjustments as a consequence of maintenance arrangements, they might drive behaviour one way or the other, but it could equally be argued that making some adjustments to maintenance in order to recognise part of the impact of costs will encourage non-resident parents, so it could cut both ways. I do not think that we have a huge amount of evidence, but I will write to the noble Lord. I do not think that these arrangements are particularly driving behaviours of any kind, although they are certainly drivers of disputes that arise at the margins of the threshold. We are trying to cut some of those down and possibly—this is part of the current thinking—to have fixed-term arrangements for shared care just as we have for the basic assessment. However, if it would help the noble Lord, I would be happy to try to encapsulate this in a note to him and, I hope, to clarify these points.