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Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I support the amendments. If the noble Lord, Lord Freud, presses them, I will happily follow him into the Lobbies. I took a slightly different route to reach the same conclusion. There have been significant changes to the workload in CMEC. When we set it up 18 months ago, one of the biggest changes related to the fact that the whole of Section 6, as it was then known—the people coming in through the income support route—was a vast administrative, bureaucratic weight that the old Child Support Agency had had to deal with. It never got off the bit; it was treading water the whole time trying to keep up with incoming cases that were not worth having. We had arguments about that. The significance of the change is that CMEC should be a much easier administrative organisation to run. Therefore, the complaint that there was not the capacity to deal with the administrative on-cost of the extra time and effort involved in going through the court process in its entirety is now much less applicable, because the organisation has a much smaller administrative workload. This would have been much safer if CMEC had worked for some time, not just a year or 18 months. The noble Lord, Lord Freud, is right: it is still in its relative infancy. It is a shame that CMEC’s quarterly statistics are published only tomorrow; it will be interesting to see how it is getting on and I look forward to reading them in some detail. I have no great expectation that the trends of residual debt and all the other things will have changed much. This will take some time. If CMEC and the child commissioner had looked at this, run it for a few years and then come back to Parliament with some data showing a trend that we could follow that demonstrated that there were significant numbers of low-income families with children who were not getting support from parents who could pay but would not, that would have been substantially different. I yield to no one about the need to get that child maintenance to those hard-pressed families; anyone who took part in the passage of the Bill could see that the case was made that, in some cases, more urgent and active steps needed to be taken. The House took a serious look at this and sent it back, so for CMEC to come back the following year and ask Ministers to try to promote it again is pushing its luck, if I may use that colloquialism. I slightly resent that. A two-year sunset clause is entirely appropriate; in fact, I would have liked a slightly longer one, but I understand the importance of keeping the driving licence and passport provisions in tune with one another with regard to the two-year period. However, if we are to go through the whole process of pursuing these non-resident parents, I think that it will take more than two years to amass a body of data that will be useful to present to the House to see whether the sunset clause should be triggered. Subject to the fact that I would have liked the period to have been slightly longer because we would have had more data to work with, it is right that the amendment should be tabled and I shall certainly vote for it. I hope that the rest of the House will as well.