Clause 23
Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
2:15 pm
Anne McGuire (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Minister for Disabled People), Department for Work and Pensions; Stirling, Labour)
Let me put it another way. If the commission and a parent with care had concurrent or interchangeable abilities of enforcement, there would be a risk of overlap and duplication that would cause confusion and increase costs. Enabling parents with care to enforce the commissioner’s maintenance assessments might potentially provide the commission with a perverse incentive to divest itself of the most difficult cases, leaving parents with care to pursue a route through legal aid or to meet the costs of enforcement themselves.