Andrew Selous (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; South West Bedfordshire, Conservative)

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

The new clause is an attempt to get a little bit of equity between the court-based system and the operation of the commission on the amount of full and frank disclosure that is made between the parties. It is proposed for the commission that the parent with care will be deprived of the opportunity to check that the information given is correct or complete and therefore will not be able to evaluate whether the commission has made an appropriate decision by reference to the information provided. In that context, will the Minister tell the Committee what will be the position in relation to HMRC and its usual, quite proper rules of privacy regarding income? We touched on that area in earlier debates, but this is a useful opportunity to revisit it.

The new clause would help parents with care to take ownership of their cases and ensure that they are not kept in the dark in respect of any aspect of them. Then, armed with that information, they would be able to decide whether they wanted to apply for a variation. I hope that the Minister will look favourably on the new clause.

James Plaskitt (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions; Warwick & Leamington, Labour)

I will try to reassure the hon. Gentleman on this new clause. We already have the powers to make regulations to decide what information can be disclosed to parents under the 1991 Act. Current regulations give the Child Support Agency the power to release all details relevant to the maintenance calculation, including the income of the non-resident parent. Furthermore, the Data Protection Act 1998 allows both parents access to all the details of their case, as it relates to them. Parents with care have access to data protection prints setting out the maintenance calculation for their case, which can be used to highlight discrepancies between expected and actual maintenance liabilities. As such, parents with care have access to all the information that they require to query details of the maintenance calculation that they believe to be flawed.

New clause 17 would allow the commission to disclose inappropriate information, such as the address or contact details of the non-resident parent, to the parent with care, with little additional prospect of an improved maintenance decision coming from that  disclosure. We must ask whether the damage to the privacy of the non-resident parent, which is important, and the opening up of the commission to the threat of legal challenge could justify such a change.

The use of HMRC income information as the basis for maintenance calculations under the new statutory scheme would also be affected by the powers that the new clause would provide. The use of such a broad power of information disclosure could endanger the flow of information from HMRC to the commission. Section 18 of the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005 in effect prohibits the disclosure of income information that has not been used for the maintenance calculation. As such, the existence of the power under the new clause would perhaps prohibit HMRC from providing the commission with vital income information—the opposite of what I am sure the hon. Gentleman would want to be the case.

Although it is true that parents with care have access to a much broader range of information once the appeals process has begun, that is the appropriate forum for access to that type of sensitive information. A closely monitored legal environment is a far more appropriate domain for the release of that information than unregulated disclosure by the commission. Although it is appropriate at the appeals stage for both parties to have access to a wider range of information to ensure that disputes can be resolved, we do not believe that disclosing that type of information in all cases, the vast majority of which will never go to appeal, should be considered. I hope that, in view of those points, the hon. Gentleman will withdraw the motion.

Andrew Selous (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; South West Bedfordshire, Conservative)

I am reassured by what the Minister has said on this occasion, because he put it clearly on the record that all necessary information in respect of the issues that I have discussed could be transferred. On the basis of what he has said, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.