New Clause 22
Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
4:45 pm

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

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

I am sure that I can see a glint in your eye, Mr. Taylor, as we reach the last new clause on the amendment paper. New clause 22 is similar to new clause 19, which we have just debated, but it relates to cases in which the commission has been trying for more than a year without success to recover debts owed to a parent with care.

The new clause would give parents with care the power, if they chose to use it—it would not force them to do anything—to approach a magistrates court or the sheriff in Scotland to seek enforcement of the debt owed to them. That useful measure would enable the parent with care to take some control over their case and would provide an incentive for CMEC to ensure that it was as successful as possible in collecting debt. I commend the new clause to the Minister.

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

I thank the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire for tabling the new clause, which provides me with the opportunity to allay concerns—I hope—regarding the future enforcement of child maintenance. It sets out circumstances, as he has described, where the parent with care could enforce a child maintenance debt.

I remind the hon. Gentleman that the provisions in the Bill will support parents with care in choosing how to pursue child maintenance initially. We are establishing the information support service, revoking section 6 of the Child Support Act 1991, to give parents with care the chance to take greater control over their maintenance arrangements. Where a parent with care chooses the commission to calculate and collect child maintenance, the new powers provided in clauses 19 to 28 will supplement the existing powers to ensure a faster and more wide-reaching enforcement process.

The commission will have a range of options available to enable it to enforce the maintenance payments, including the deduction of earnings order, the current account deduction order and/or the lump sum deduction order, all of which will only be operable by the commission. Similarly, only the commission will be able to make an administrative liability order, which will allow for the use of bailiffs and, in England and Wales, applications to the county court for third-party debt orders and charging orders that can lead to forced sale of property. Where the non-resident parent is wilfully refusing or culpably neglecting to pay maintenance, the commission can force the surrender  of passports or apply to the courts for disqualification from driving, for a curfew order or even for committal to prison.

In view of the extensive range of provisions available to the commission, I urge the hon. Gentleman to consider the circumstances under which the parent with care, on pursuing maintenance in the magistrates courts after one year of enforcement action by the commission, would be any more likely to have success.

I understand the sentiment behind the new clause. Since its inception in 1993, the Child Support Agency has, in too many cases, been slow or has failed to enforce maintenance as assessed. However, allowing the parent with care effectively to take over enforcement action from the commission where it has not collected all moneys due could act as a disincentive to the commission to pursue its more difficult cases. I ask the Committee to consider the wider-reaching impacts of the new clause. It could risk complication and duplication in the courts, without any significant benefit to the children, and it could be inequitable in cases where the non-resident parent owes maintenance to more than one parent with care and/or the Secretary of State. In view of that, I urge the hon. Gentleman not to press the new clause to a Division.

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

I have listened carefully to the Minister. He gave a summary of the CMEC’s powers to enforce and collect debt and to ensure that debt does not accumulate in the first place, the vast majority of which we Conservatives are happy with and welcome. However, none of what he said in respect of those matters touched on what new clause 22 is trying to do, which is to address a situation where all those powers have failed and the commission has had a full year to pursue debt that has accumulated in spite of the various powers that it will have. Many parents with care have, under the CSA, felt too powerless to do anything themselves to recover the huge amounts of debt owed to them.

It was only in the last sentence or so that the Minister made me think twice about the new clause—when he mentioned the possibility of the power it contains being used to pursue a non-resident parent whose affairs were complicated and who had perhaps become a parent with care himself. In the light of that, I am prepared not to press the new clause, although I may perhaps think about taking it up again in another format. However, given what he has said, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

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

I beg to move,

That certain written evidence already reported to the House be appended to the proceedings of the Committee.

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

We have reached the end of the Committee stage, and, in one sense, it has been a long journey because we started on 19 July. In another sense, it has not been such a long journey, because we took a long time off in the middle of that and managed to get through the Bill in 12 sittings.

May I first thank you, Mr. Taylor, for chairing our proceedings and for the fine manner with which you have done it? I also extend my thanks to your colleague, Mr. Chope, for the sittings that he chaired. I owe thanks to several other people, including my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly, who has kept us whipped and in order, and the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling, who took us through important clauses relating to enforcement, debt and those today that related to mesothelioma. I am grateful to her.

I am grateful also to the leading spokespeople for the other parties—to the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire for approaching the Bill constructively and with great seriousness and thought. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Angus, who has been similarly assiduous on many points about which he had concerns. He contributed much value to our proceedings. I was going to extend similar thanks to the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, but I guess that he is polishing his CV. Therefore, I will extend those thanks to the hon. Member for Rochdale instead, who has borne the brunt of that role.

I want to thank my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Derbyshire, who has given me support as my Parliamentary Private Secretary during the course of proceedings. She has had to be ready at any time to supply me with mid-flight refuelling and has been ever expectant. I would like to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone for his contribution, in particular to our debates on mesothelioma. He denied that he was an expert and then proved that the opposite was the case by speaking articulately and with great knowledge about that important subject.

I also thank all of the other members of the Committee for their attendance, support and contributions. All of our sittings have been, without exception, constructive and extremely good natured, and the Bill has been pretty well scrutinised. As a result of our proceedings, we have collectively improved the Bill, and that is one of the main purposes of these sittings. In that respect, it is a job well done.

Finally, I want to thank the Bill team, who have been with us throughout, were involved long before our proceedings, and have been a superb support to me and my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary. We are very grateful to them for their immense hard work in bringing this important legislation though in such good shape.

This is a tough area in which to legislate and a difficult part of the welfare world. We are legislating in this area only because of such things as relationship breakdowns, emotion and tension, and as a result of the unfortunate fact that some parents wish to be non-compliant, preferring instead not to face up to their responsibilities. If everyone always faced up to their responsibilities, we probably would not need the Bill.

We are dealing with human failure—it is not for us to judge, but it happens—and it is inevitably difficult to deal with. We know that there is no perfect solution. I was not here at the time, but the same things could have been said about the legislation that brought the CSA into existence. That had cross-party support and many  similar things may have been said about why it had to be brought into being. It has not had a happy history, which is why we are now taking a completely new approach to trying to secure a reliable and workable system of child support.

We are building on the lessons learned from the CSA’s history. I stress again that the failings of that agency are in no regard to be visited on its staff, either then or now. They have been working with and trying to make the best of a broken system. They want nothing more than to be part of a good, efficient and effective child maintenance and support system that delivers for the children. I thank them for all their efforts in working with the current system, but also for the help that they gave Ministers as we considered the reforms that led to the introduction of CMEC. We have engaged with them and drawn on their knowledge and experience, and they are as hopeful as we are that we have found a good solution.

It is a fundamental change—a big change—that relies much more on extending choice to parents and pulling the state out of arrangements when perhaps the state should not be there. Hopefully, it will give much more support and guidance to the people to make those choices and put in place the arrangements necessary to support their children.

We are also significantly strengthening enforcement. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, we sometimes have to deal with those non-resident parents who would rather not face up to their responsibilities and who, in so doing, damage and harm the reputation of the countless non-resident parents who consistently, steadily and faithfully honour their obligations to their children. We must not forget them simply because the minority behave in that way. We should not cast aspersions on the vast majority who do exactly the right thing.

We are trying to learn from the lessons of the past in making these big changes, which are backed with enforcement to ensure that we do the best we can for the main people involved—the children. We hope and believe that the commission has a far more effective structure and organisation in order to get the flow of maintenance that is so essential to the children, and it is on their behalf that we act.

I thank all hon. Members again for their contributions. Together, we have improved the Bill. I think that we will have provided a good service for many thousands of children in the future.

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

I begin by thanking you, Mr. Taylor, for the way in which you have kept us in order—firmly and fairly, but always with good humour. I put those compliments on the record also for your co-Chairman, Mr. Chope, who chaired some of our earlier proceedings. I also thank the police, the Hansard writers, the Clerks, the Door Keepers and those officials without whom we the Committee could not have worked—people who are not in the front line, and whose words will not appear in the Official Report, but who we all realise are essential to our proceedings and without whom this place could not work. I say that as someone who sometimes queues for tea for his own staff.

Earlier in our proceedings, just before the summer recess, the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington, said that he would have a summer of reflection—a chance to reflect on what had been said up till that point. That was the case, but there are still a few weeks for an autumn of discernment as we run up to Report and Third Reading.

I hope that the Minister and his hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Stirling, will reflect on our debates. It is not always easy or appropriate in Committee to think deeply about technical and complicated issues, but I am sure that I speak for all hon. Members on the Opposition Benches when I say that we want to make the Bill work. We supported it when we thought it should be supported, and we tried to be constructive when we thought things could be done better.

I thank the Minister for his kind words. Both Ministers have been courteous and have unfailingly taken interventions, which have often been long, complicated and technical. I have watched the odd moment of slight terror as they turned to their officials hoping for a piece of paper coming towards them, but our proceedings have been seamless, as Hansard will show.

I thank my hon. Friends, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean, who has important responsibilities for disabilities and who has assisted me throughout long periods of our proceedings. I also thank our Whip, my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough, who has kept us in order, and my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare, who sits on the Work and Pensions Committee and whose advice I always welcome.

The Selection Committee has appointed my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Bedfordshire to another important Committee, and I want to put it on the record that she is doing important work further along the corridor. I am particularly grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry for his wise and sage advice. He has followed these issues for many years.

I want to put on the record the fact that the staff of the CSA have laboured under huge difficulties to try to make it work in years gone by. They, too, have shared the frustrations of all hon. Members as we have dealt with such issues in our constituency mailbags. It is not their fault that the computers have not worked as well as they would have liked or they have not had the tools at their disposal to make enforcement work as well as it should have done. It is important to put that on the record.

Paul Rowen (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Rochdale, Liberal Democrat)

I echo some of those thanks, particularly those to you, Mr. Taylor, and to Mr. Chope for chairing our proceedings so well. We have had 12 sittings and kept to schedule, but no one would complain that they have not had the opportunity to express a point of view.

I thank all staff of the House who have assisted you—Hansard and so on—and who have played an important part. On behalf of my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, I thank  the two Ministers who have answered the points that we have raised. We have not always agreed on the substance, but we have always been assured that we would receive answers.

This is my first experience of a work and pensions Bill—it will probably not be the last—and, as other hon. Members have said, it covers hugely important issues. The CSA is important and affects many of our constituents. Its staff have laboured on the huge task of getting it right. I know from my office’s daily contact with it that they strive with a system that is broke and not working, but they ensure that it delivers.

I hope that with further changes that we might make as the Bill moves through the House, we will have the basis of a workable solution. I am sure that every hon. Member intends to ensure that this aspect of legislation is dealt with and works properly. That was the intention of the Act that set up the CSA. It has not worked, and I hope that the Bill puts that in  perspective. I thank all hon. Members, particularly Opposition Members, who have supported me and assisted in moving important amendments.

David Taylor (North West Leicestershire, Labour)

I shall certainly pass on the sentiments of those who have spoken to my fellow Chairman, Mr. Chope. I express my gratitude to him for chairing two sittings at very late notice, and I thank the Clerk to the Committee for his unfailing patience and excellent advice. The legislative ship, after a long voyage of 13 weeks and 12 sittings, straddling a summer recess, is docking four hours and 40 minutes earlier than the target out time. That is due in no small measure to the spirit and good order that has characterised the debate, for which Mr. Chope and I are most grateful.