Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
10:47 am
James Plaskitt (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions; Warwick and Leamington, Labour)
May I try to help in answering that? It is sensible to approach the regulations in different categories. First, much of the Bill is framework architecture for work that the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission will do subsequently. It is important to stress that we are moving from an agency model to a commission model. It is right, in many respects, to allow the commission to devise its own systems. Therefore, it is right and proper that the commission be established first and then for it to think how it wants to proceed in respect of various areas—some of those things will eventually emerge via regulation. Logically, the regulations will not come forward until the commission has done that work. Examples of operational regulations that need to await Royal Assent and the establishment of the commission are those that relate to fees, maintenance assessments, and the transfer of cases.
However, I may help the Committee by pointing out that other regulations will relate more to the setting up of the new system, and they will come forward sooner. For example, regulations relating to CMEC as a legal entity, the extension of the £10 disregard to old cases, the repeal of section 6 of the 1991 Act—that is the compulsory engagement of benefit recipients into the system—and the new enforcement powers will come forward earlier. We suspect that that will take place in the spring of 2008.
There is a third category where we hope to bring forward draft regulations during the procedure of line-by-line scrutiny in Committee. For example, those draft regulations that can be proceeded with in a timely fashion relate to clauses 29 to 31, which cover debt management, clause 34, which covers the recovery of arrears from estates, and clause 35, which deals with the disclosure of information to credit reference agencies. I expect draft regulations on those clauses to come before the Committee. In respect of those for which we cannot put draft regulations before the Committee, we will produce a dossier for it to consider, which will provide an explanation about regulations that are still forthcoming.