Child Support Agency

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 4:12 pm on 17 January 2006.

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Photo of James Plaskitt James Plaskitt Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions 4:12, 17 January 2006

The hon. Gentleman makes two points. He is right about the cost to the taxpayer before the agency was set up. That is one of the reasons for the previous Government's decision to introduce the agency and move away from the court-based system.

The hon. Gentleman is not entirely right about the two schemes. I understand his point—I have made the same criticism of the position before today. Two schemes are running in parallel—in some ways, the position is even more complex because there are sub-divisions in the schemes. However, if he can await the statement that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will make shortly on the agency, he will find an answer to his point.

Before the agency was introduced in April 1993, there were two main routes for cases in which couples could not make their child maintenance arrangements. Maintenance was determined by the courts, which enforced it only on application to do so and with limited facility to trace non-paying parents. When the parent with care was on benefit, maintenance was secured through the then Department of Social Security's liable relative scheme. That involved benefits staff negotiating an amount of maintenance with the non-resident parent, who was generally paid only while the parent with care stayed on benefit. That resulted in massive inconsistency in the amounts paid, and did not support parents who wanted to return to work.

The original child support scheme introduced with the CSA was meant to address those problems. In the event, however, we had an initial formula that parents, their advisers and even agency staff just did not understand. The agency therefore hit problems from day one, but the Government's approach at the time was to introduce a whole range of legislative changes that served only to add to the complexity of the scheme, until they reached the point under the old scheme at which some cases needed up to 100 separate pieces of information to make an assessment. That had the effect of drawing staff away from enforcement and into information gathering, meanwhile leaving many more children in poverty.