Schedule 1
Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
1:30 pm
James Plaskitt (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions; Warwick and Leamington, Labour)
I have, of course, had time to reflect at length on the contributions made on the amendment, but have not altered my conclusions. The contributions of the hon. Members for South-West Bedfordshire, for Rochdale and for Angus had one thing in common. There is a bit of a misunderstanding on their part about the chronology in relation to staff numbers in the agency. Let me try to clear that up for them. As they know, there is an operational target set by the Department on staffing numbers, which envisages a 15 per cent. reduction and is designed to take the head count to 9,547 by March 2008. That date is very important because, as I understood it, all hon. Members who concentrated on the staffing reduction seemed to associate it with the introduction of CMEC. However, as they will see, CMEC picking up the reins and assuming responsibility for the way that child support evolves will take place largely after 2008. It is very important to understand that point, but I will say a little more about the reduction in staffing levels.
It is important to understand that the head count that we are aiming to achieve by March 2008 takes the operational numbers, by and large, back down to their level before the operational improvement plan. That point is also important in getting the numbers in context.
The operational improvement plan, which is now only one year into its operation, is a concerted attempt to get to grips with some of the historic operational issues in the CSA. On the basis of its first year, the plan it is making very good progress and we are therefore pretty confident that the tough targets that we set will be achieved.
Many of the targets are concerned with systemic reform. Once they are achieved and the historic legacy problems ironed out, the agency should be able to continue operating at that much improved level without the additional staff that were necessary to correct the long-standing problems. The large backlog of unclear cases is now coming down, there is faster treatment of new applications and telephony is much improved.
I hope that hon. Members understand that the head count numbers that they have been focusing on lead up to March 2008 and have more to do with delivering the operational improvement plan than setting staffing levels in some predictive way for the forthcoming commission. I will expand a bit more on that later.