Written evidence to be reported to the House
Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
12:00 pm
Janet Allbeson: We suggested that, in the Bill, there should be no institutional bias towards voluntary arrangements and that the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission should have the job of getting child maintenance per se and should be helping parents work out what is the best option for them.
On monitoring voluntary agreements, the Bill talks in clause 2 about the commission’s obligation to set up “appropriate voluntary maintenance arrangements”. There is a question about what that means and, if there are any objections to the commission’s achieving that, how it will judge whether it has achieved it or not. There has to be some monitoring, simply to know whether it is reaching its objectives.