Written evidence to be reported to the House
Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
12:00 pm
Tim Boswell (Daventry, Conservative)
I think that we all will be fairly familiar from our constituency postbag with cases—I want you to confirm that there are such cases—where the absent parent resorts to various tactics, such as physical mobility, job mobility, redefinition of employment as self-employment and so on. You are nodding, so I take it that you confirm, at least, that it is not unfamiliar to you. Clearly, the result for the parent with care is pretty ghastly. Can you give us any indication—it might be relevant to the future of the new scheme—of how much you think that is related to what might be termed “malicious contacts”, whereby people take advice on the internet or otherwise on how to subvert the existing system? Do you have any confidence that the new system will be robust against such an organised attack? Ministers have clearly given some attention to that.
To single out a particular case in which there is an inequity, what about the situation in today’s world of complex families whereby a parent is paying maintenance in respect of a child from a previous relationship but failing to receive it for a child whom they are now maintaining? That seems to aggravate the sense of unfairness and unacceptability about what has been happening and what none of us wants to happen in the future.