Written evidence to be reported to the House
Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
12:00 pm
Janet Allbeson: What we are concerned about is maintenance for the child. HMRC’s interest is in getting tax in for the Revenue. There is a different interest. We think there should be a scrutiny and verification unit inside CMEC that has the job of going after NRPs who appear to be hiding income and also dealing with the variation procedure. A scrutiny and verification unit would look into that.
Stephen Geraghty was saying this morning that it was up to the parent with care: “If she can prove it to us, we do it.” When you think about it, that is ridiculous. It is one of the big avenues of avoidance. CMEC has enormous powers to go to credit reference agencies. Instantly—at a glance—you can see if someone who says their income is £50 a week has all sorts of credit and commitments. There are ways that it could go into bank accounts and look at the income. The NRP should be obliged to disclose his bank statements and that kind of thing so that you can see where the money is going, in and out. One of the ways in which child maintenance works is that the NRP will try to minimise his liability. If you do not tackle that, in a sense, you are cheating the children who need the money.
We want a scrutiny and verification unit and an obligation on the NRP to prove his income, because if you go through the variation procedure, the onus is on the parent with care to prove their income, not on the NRP to prove his income, which does not make sense.
We would also like greater use of the information that the courts hold. In a lot of cases where there is money, there will be separate financial ancillary proceedings going through the courts to decide about the house, the pension and the capital settlements of various sorts. They have very strong powers to require the disclosure of information on the threat of going to prison. That is very useful information, but at the moment there is no procedure for it to be shared with CMEC. It is not in schedule 6, and we think that CMEC should be able to have access to all the financial information that has been disclosed to the courts to get a better idea about the real financial circumstances of the NRP.