Examination of Witnesses

Part of Childcare Payments Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 2:30 pm on 16 October 2014.

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Suzanne Newton: We will require parents to do a light-touch reconfirmation each quarter. It will be a prospective look that actually asks them how much they expect to earn in the coming period. The RTI programme that I worked on in the past is obviously backward-looking. We will check what is provided against our RTI data sources, but we do not have some of the other eligibility things, so we would not necessarily be able to check self-employment or some of the child eligibility criteria in real time, for example.

We will make the quarterly reconfirmation as light-touch as we can—hopefully just a few clicks. We will do most of the checking while parents are online. If they have three children, they will reconfirm all three in one go. The system is there to ensure that the right parents get the right money.