Schedule 4
Child Maintenance and Other Payments
12:30 pm
Andrew Selous (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; South West Bedfordshire, Conservative)
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise that point, but I think that you would rule me out of order, Mr. Chope, if I went into a detailed discussion of it now. In future sittings, the Committee will discuss a series of amendments that address those issues. However, as ever, my hon. Friend is absolutely right, and he has yet again put his finger on a key issue that we must get right, namely the ability of some non-resident parents to structure their affairs in a way that may be perfectly legal as far as the tax authorities are concerned, but is frankly morally wrong, and should, in my view, be legally wrong when it concerns the avoidance of maintenance payments to children who need them and are entitled to them.
Returning to the IT challenges that will face both HMRC and CMEC, paragraph 4.9 of child support White Paper, which was published in December 2006, states:
“Discussions between the Department for Work and Pensions and HM Revenue & Customs about the precise configuration of the data gateways to support the necessary movement of information to C-MEC are under way.”
Can the Minister give us an update on those discussions? I appreciate that due to commercial confidentiality there are limits to what he can say, but it is important to get it right. It is also important that members of the Committee are fully briefed as to the Minister’s intentions and what work has been undertaken in this area so far.
Amendment No. 115 touches on issues regarding what the rules will be as far as HMRC is concerned, and the sharing of income information from a non-resident parent with the parent with care. At the moment, HMRC quite properly has a duty of confidentiality to all taxpayers. Will that be the case going forward with its new role where the parent with care is concerned? It is a perfectly legitimate argument to say that the parent with care has an interest in having information about the non-resident parent’s income. That is particularly true given that the standard line at the moment from the CSA to parents with care in cases of suspected under-declaration of income to reduce maintenance is, “Go and find it out yourself. Be your own private detective.” Those are the sorts of conversations—perhaps not those exact words, but along those lines—that the CSA has with our constituents. Those issues are important and need to be teased out.
If I may make my final comments on the amendment. I recently met officials from EDS, a company that will be familiar to the Minister, as it is on the verge of being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Department—there is certainly a close working relationship between them, although there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. Some 3,000 of its staff work for the Department. In a recent letter to me, EDS said that
“until the Bill has received Royal Assent and the commission is established, it is unclear what system will be needed and who therefore might choose to bid for the contract (or contracts).”
That is legally correct. Of course, no one would expect EDS to say anything else, because there is legal form, but I would be incredulous, as would all Committee members, if detailed advance discussions were not held about the IT that we will need to make the system work. I am not asking the Minister to breach commercial confidentiality, but given that a range of Departments—not just the Minister’s—have a chequered history with large-scale IT contracts in recent years, I cannot overemphasise how fundamental that is to CMEC’s functioning smoothly and being the success that we all want it to be.