New Clause 17
Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
4:45 pm
James Plaskitt (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions; Warwick and 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.