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Welfare Reform Bill

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), and I shall echo some of his remarks on the child maintenance charge. I have been privileged to be a Member for 20 years, and I have noted that the issue of child maintenance and child support has been a running controversy and a running sore through Parliament and Government during that whole period. I shall briefly remind the House of the background. While there have, of course, always been children in this and similar countries brought up by only one parent—war widows after the first world war would be an obvious example—it is nevertheless true that in the post-war period there has been a kind of social revolution whereby very significant numbers of children spend either a proportion or all of their childhoods living—usually with their mum but sometimes, in a minority of cases, with their father—in so-called one-parent families. That is about divorce, which remains at a high level; it is about separation—and cohabitation is more likely to lead to separation than marriage; it is about the fact that many children are born ““out of wedlock””, to use a quaint term, and live with a single mother. This has been a major contributory cause to what we call child poverty, which interfaces with economic insecurity. I think that Parliaments and Governments have found it more difficult to grapple with and honestly discuss family insecurity than economic insecurity caused by low wages or unemployment. As I say, Governments have found it difficult. The old maintenance system, which was run by the courts, did not work: it delivered low levels of maintenance or no maintenance to many mothers and children. The previous Conservative Government established the Child Support Agency—I think they were right to do so—but many former Conservative Ministers bear the scars of trying to make it work. They did not make it work effectively for all children. That was not because of incompetence—there were computer problems and the rest—but because this is one of the most difficult areas of government. It is the state—perfectly properly, in my judgment—trying to mediate during the pain, anger and passions of family breakdown, when issues of access and custody are also present. Although the old Child Support Agency had some successes, it never succeeded in getting maintenance from those fathers—yes, I know, sometimes mothers, but I am going to talk about fathers—who absolutely refused to fulfil their parental obligation and support their own children. The last Labour Government tried to improve the situation and they might have done to some extent, but if we are honest about this—I am not normally one who tries to take the politics out of politics; otherwise I would have to join the Liberal Democrat party—some humility is justified in this case. For getting on for 20 years, Governments of left and right have failed to tackle this issue adequately. We really need to point again at the sheer scandal of there being too many parents out there who refuse to support their own children financially. That is the reality. When I intervened on the Minister—it was good of her to give me the statistics—she said that among these families half, fully half, are not receiving child maintenance. What does that mean? It means either that the children are living in relative poverty and/or that other mums and dads in the community, whom we call taxpayers, are being asked in difficult economic circumstances to support not only their own children but other people's children as well. What I am leading up to is to ask whether the idea of a charge to be able to use the system helps or hinders that process. I do not think I am against a charge per se. Given that taxpayers have a stake in this, as well as, usually, the mother or ““the parent with care”” to use the awful jargon, and the child—they are the parties that have an interest in this—I am not against the taxpayer in a sense benefiting through proper payment of maintenance. We could discuss how that might come about; but if there is to be a charge, as was argued by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), why should it not be levied when the flows of maintenance are coming to the mother and benefiting the child? Why should a fee be charged immediately rather than later in the process? I think that many Members would agree with that, but perhaps the Minister would like to comment.