Clause 13
Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
6:00 pm
James Plaskitt (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions; Warwick and Leamington, Labour)
As hon. Members know, we intend to transfer the child support functions, which are currently the responsibility of the Secretary of State, to the commission in 2008, at which point the CSA will cease to exist and the commission will be made responsible for delivering child maintenance services.
Clause 13 will ensure that, when those functions are transferred, all the people employed by the CSA will also transfer to the commission. In other words, it will ensure that, from day one, the commission will have the people that it needs to fulfil its responsibilities. There are exceptions, as the hon. Member for Rochdale said, and there are good reasons for them. We therefore expect to use clause 13(5) to exclude from the transfer those who are working at the CSA as consultants or working there under contract for a private sector organisation at the time of transfer.
The people employed by the CSA are its biggest asset. They will be critical to the development of the modern service that needs to be put in place. Our staff will provide the commission with a strong base on which to build. At this point, I should like to pay tribute to the agency’s staff. Over the past few months, my fellow Ministers in the Department and I have held question and answer discussion sessions at various CSA offices throughout the country, because we wanted the opportunity to discuss with staff this substantial change. Those meetings were widely welcomed by the staff involved, who, quite understandably, had a series of questions and some concerns about the big change that is happening in their organisation.
What came out of those meetings——and continues to come out of them as we hold them——was the huge commitment of the CSA staff, not only to their current task, to which their commitment is beyond any question, but to making CMEC work. After all, they want to be part of a successful child maintenance operation and they are prepared to give their all to help us to achieve that. Many of them have worked for the agency for a long time and have been in the difficult spot of working with a flawed design, which has been a tough task.
I can report that the staff are pleased with the introduction of the operational improvement plan. They have seen the tangible benefit of that additional investment. They see it as essential preparation of the ground, which we are going through with their help, for a smooth transition to CMEC. We need to do our best to look after the staff, who have worked extraordinarily hard and with great commitment to do their best with the CSA. They want to help us to deliver the marked improvement that CMEC will represent.