Clause 6
Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
10:30 am
Danny Alexander (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, Liberal Democrat)
I beg to move amendment No. 68, in clause 6, page 2, line 27, after ‘fees’, insert
‘to a person who has failed to pay an amount of child support maintenance’.
It is a pleasure, Mr. Chope, to serve under your chairmanship for the first time. This is my first contribution to these debates, but I promise it will not be my last. Having spent the last couple of weeks learning for myself the obligations of parenthood, I have been afforded a degree of time to study the evidence given to the Committee and the debates that have taken place so far.
Amendment No. 68 and subsequent amendments relate to the subject of fees and the potential of the new Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission to charge for its services. They are matters about which there is the potential for some controversy.
I note that at point No. 10 in his written submission, Professor Nick Wikeley said:
“The question of charging fees will doubtless be controversial”.
He went on to say:
“The obvious point is that charging fees is unlikely to be effective if customer service remains at current levels.”
We will come to that when we discuss a subsequent amendment.
With amendment No. 68, I wish to probe the Government’s intentions about the circumstances in which they intend to charge fees. The note in the evidence that was kindly given to Members in a folder in advance of our deliberations is pretty opaque on the matter. Things were not made a great deal clearer when I read the oral evidence taken during the Committee’s first two sittings.
In evidence, Lord McKenzie said:
“No decision has been made on charging yet.”
However, even from the evidence, the nature and purpose of the charging regime that the Government seek to introduce was fairly fuzzy and opaque. On the one hand, Lord McKenzie said that he did not wish to
“force people—particularly low-income families—out of the system and prevent them from entering into proper and effective maintenance agreements.”
Hilary Reynolds thought that it was
“highly unlikely that charging would start before 2010”.——[Official Report, Child Maintenance and Other Payments Public Bill Committee, 17 July 2007; c. 12.]
However, that does not preclude it starting before that date, although the Government’s note on the matter is slightly clearer. Will the Minister clarify the timing on charging?
Although Lord McKenzie said that he did not wish low-income families to be penalised by charging, he also said:
“Clearly we would wish people to be incentivised to use private agreements...and therefore, I suppose, not to use the system unnecessarily if it can be avoided and if it is not appropriate.”——[Official Report, Child Maintenance and Other Payments Public Bill Committee, 17 July 2007; c. 13.]
If the purpose of charging is at least in part to incentivise people to make private agreements, the flip-side is that if the charging regime is pervasive it will serve to disincentivise people from making an application to CMEC.
The purpose of the amendment is to try to narrow the range of people to whom fees may be charged. Specifically—the Minister made this point in oral evidence—fees may be useful in cases when people such as non-resident parents fail to discharge their obligations, as the fee would be more like a penalty. The amendment suggests that fees should be payable by those who fail to comply with their obligations—in this case, by failing to pay child support maintenance.
It would help if the Minister made clear his intentions about the range of people to whom charges might be applied. Clause 6 leaves it wide open. Fees could be charged to any and all people who interact with CMEC in any way, whether parents with care or non-resident parents. They could be charged in a range of circumstances. It has been explained that the issue is not principally about cost recovery. None the less, a charging regime that leaves open the possibility that a level of charges might be introduced for all applicants, including parents with care, that is sufficient to incentivise private agreements—in other words, add a sufficient amount to disincentivise people from choosing CMEC as their first option—could be a boon to that type of charging.