Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
10:47 am
Lord McKenzie: We propose that, as for employed people, the assessment for self-employed people will be based on tax data. I suppose that if someone is cheating on their partner they will cheat on HMRC as well. Therefore, we will look to the safeguards in the tax system to support the basis that we use. There will still be a variations arrangement, under which someone who believes that the income reported for the non-resident parent does not properly reflect their lifestyle can seek an adjustment.
One of the things that we are working on is to see whether that variation process can be made more accessible. In the past, it has operated on quite a restrictive basis. We are trying to open that up a bit. Basing these calculations on tax data is a pretty solid footing. What we have also done, and we did this quite recently, was to adjust the result of the Smith case and we fed back capital allowances into the system. That was the right thing to do.