Clause 12
Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
5:30 pm
James Plaskitt (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions; Warwick and Leamington, Labour)
I shall begin with the points raised by the hon. Member for Forest of Dean and work back to the others. In a sense, there are real problems with what he is asking. On the one hand he wants to ensure a clean break and is raising questions about whether that can be achieved by transferring functions. The implication, as I hear it, is that he wants to achieve a clean break by completely bringing all the functions of the CSA to a full stop somehow, as if it were possible to switch off one system, pack it up, put it away and then switch on another one and start again with something new. With respect to him, that cannot be done because there are at least 650,000 children involved for whom the most critical thing is that we ensure an uninterrupted and steady flow of maintenance. It is therefore extremely important to have as smooth as possible a glide path, if I might use the phrase again, from the existing cases within the agency into the new commission. Let me put it this way: despite all the problems that we are familiar with in the context of the agency, I would hope that those parents for whom the system currently works—and there are many for whom it does work—will not notice the difference. It is important that smoothly running flows of child maintenance should continue. For that reason, it is not possible simply to switch off one agency and start another. The carry-over from one to the other is critical.