Clause 15
Child Maintenance and Other Payments
10:30 am
Andrew Selous (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; South West Bedfordshire, Conservative)
I welcome you back to the chairmanship of our Committee after the long summer break, Mr. Chope. I am sure that the Ministers have had the same joy as Opposition Members in getting back to speed on our earlier discussions. I am sure that we will all get back into the swing of our deliberations, which proceeded in a focused and constructive manner in previous sittings. The hon. Member for Rochdale will, no doubt, discuss amendment No. 45 in due course.
The clause makes a major change to the current system of child support by repealing sections 6 and 46 of the Child Support Act 1991. Section 6 requires those in receipt of benefit to lodge an application for child maintenance with the Child Support Agency, which is, in broad terms, a reform that the official Opposition support. It will provide equality of treatment to all sections of the population and will not force one section to go down a route that they might not want to go down. However, as with any change of this nature, that inevitably raises a number of other questions, which I hope will provoke a debate and a response from the Minister.
It is worth putting on the record a few facts relating to the abolition of section 6. At the moment, only 31 per cent. of parents with care who are on benefit received child maintenance in the previous three months. That comes from the CSA’s quarterly statistics of March 2007, table 13.1. Therefore, the requirement in section 6 is not working, as 69 per cent. of parents with care who are on benefit are not receiving child maintenance to start with. Two thirds of the cases that are taken on because a parent with care has claimed benefit never reach the stage of an initial calculation and payment set-up. That information is also from the CSA’s quarterly statistics of March 2007, table 2.2. We also know, as was explained by the Minister’s colleague Lord McKenzie in our evidence-taking session, that many parents with care also withdraw before a calculation has been made, because they go off benefit, so we understand and are broadly sympathetic to what the Government are doing.