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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

My Lords, I acknowledge the service that the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, has done by moving the amendment. It is a very serious and significant issue. I wish to make two points about it. I, too, have seen some of the cases produced by resolution and they are compelling. They make pretty dire reading in terms of their outcomes for the families that they affect. Therefore, I absolutely agree that we need to think this through carefully. However, a long time ago I was a consistorial solicitor in a family practice in Roxburghshire. In my experience, there is a world of difference between the law that applies to families with assets and incomes on both sides and the arrangements that need to be made sensibly for people on income-support-based JSA. My worry is that if we agreed to the amendment as drafted, you would lock out for four years some of the parents on benefit who entered agreements. That is difficult to contemplate, because the new CMEC—fingers crossed—will, I hope, sort itself out and become an efficient child maintenance collection system, which people will have recourse to with confidence. The trouble is that you cannot pick and choose. You cannot amend the law to depend on the current net value and worth of the members of the household to whom it applies. Therefore, you have to be careful about how you do this. I just wanted to enter that caveat. I absolutely understand the case that the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, made, and I understand that according to evidence there have been dire results for the people affected. But over the piece I am more confident perhaps than I have been that the new commission will set a new benchmark and that the courts will operate a new system in the shadow of CMEC. That will become much more a default situation to which people will be able to respond. I hope that that will help some of the families to which the noble Lord rightly pointed. My real reason for getting to my feet on this amendment—and I acknowledge the fact that the noble Lord has ingeniously found a way of raising this important question on the schedule—is that there is still a feeling that there is a problem in Scotland, where there are peculiar court procedures, with Books of Council and Session and registered maintenance agreements that are enforceable at first instance, because they are registered in the Books of Council and Session. I know that the Minister and his advisers looked at this—some time ago, I suspect. I had hoped and assumed that the problem had been sorted, but I am told that civil practitioners in Scotland still face difficulties. They would certainly endorse the proposal by the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, to move to a four-year period, because it would give them more scope and room for manoeuvre. I would feel a lot happier if the Minister or some of his advisers would talk to the appropriate committee members from the Law Society of Scotland, who are serious people. They are the professionals who, day after day, deal with the problems to which the noble Lord alluded. Arrangements that have bad effects on families last for a long time. My special plea to the Minister is that some last-minute conversations could perhaps be had with members of the Law Society of Scotland’s expert committee on these matters to see whether there can be some ring-fencing of the arrangements made in the civil courts in Scotland. The last thing that we want is to have some mad nationalists running around saying that this mad Parliament in Westminster is interfering with our age-old, tried and tested systems of civil litigation in divorce and consistorial cases. That would serve none of our interests. My main point on this important amendment is to ask the Minister to look carefully again at this and perhaps agree to see representatives—or get some of his advisers to see representatives—who could argue the case regarding the peculiar circumstances of Scotland more adequately than me.