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)
Many indicators apply to the operational improvement plan and I am not asserting, just one year into it, that every single one is now moving in the correct direction. The key priorities in the first year of the plan are resolving what are known as stuck cases, on which progress is being made; beginning a substantial reduction in the backlog of uncleared cases, and those are down substantially; and getting more maintenance payments flowing through. From memory, I think that I am right in saying that in the first year of the plan, about 58,000 more children are in receipt of maintenance than before we embarked on it. Those are very promising indicators of the plan’s success. There is, of course, much more to be done with two years of the plan to go.