Clause 40
Welfare Reform Bill
10:30 am
Mark Harper (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Forest of Dean, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment 33, in clause 40, page 43, line 39, leave out subsection (7).
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Hood, on this last day of the Committee’s proceedings.
This is a probing amendment; its primary purpose is to probe Ministers on the means by which disqualification orders will be served, to ensure that they are received by those persons that they are aimed at. One organisation that campaigns in that area, Families Need Fathers, has told us that quite a lot of communication from the Child Support Agency, and more recently from the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission, tends to go missing. It also said that, to be honest, people tend to be blasÃ(c) about letters from the Child Support Agency.
I should like to probe Ministers on the method by which the disqualification orders will be served, the nature of them, and the procedure to ensure that individuals have actually received notice of the intention to disqualify them from their driving licence or travel authorisation. How would we avoid, for example, the notice turning up in the post, someone being away for a week and discovering on their return that their driving licence has been taken away? I should like some detail about how that will work—will it be delivered by post, recorded delivery, or a visit? Will there have to be some evidence that the document has been received? This is a probing amendment to cover such issues and to ensure that, given the seriousness of this penalty and the fact that it can be imposed by an administrative order, the proper procedures are in place to ensure that the right people receive the notice and that they have been made aware of it before those steps are taken.
For the benefit of the Committee, as general background to the clause, I think the Secretary of State was quite right to point out at Second Reading that this procedure represents a change from the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008. One of the things that is important, and one of the reasons that we decided to support this, was that in a subsequent clause there is effectively a sunset clause—this will have to be looked at to determine how effective it would be. I know from discussions that my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), who speaks for us on child maintenance issues, has had evidence, albeit anecdotal, from the United States of America that the threat of those disqualification orders for both driving licences and travel authorisation is apparently a very effective way of changing the behaviour of non-resident parents. Given that effectiveness, it is at least worth trying this approach.
The Bill makes it clear that, after the two-year review period, Ministers have to look at the evidence and lay that report before Parliament and take a decision either to allow this to continue or to stop it. Given that the provisions are time-limited to 30 months and that there is then an opportunity for Parliament to assess whether they have worked, it is worth trying them. If we are going to do it, it is imperative that the Government make sure that it works properly—nothing would discredit this more quickly than a small number of non-resident parents receiving disqualification orders and there being a problem in their delivery, creating a number of injustices. That would be the quickest way to bring this procedure into disrepute, which would ultimately harm the children and the families that it is meant to help. It would be helpful to the Committee if the Minister could clear that up.