Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

My noble friend makes a perfectly reasonable point. It is a vexed issue why one parent should be required to pay for the cost of activities that are forgone as a result of contact being denied while the other parent is not making their child support payments as they ought to. There is of course an elementary justice to what she says, but our response is that they are two entirely separate regimes and, in this world, two wrongs do not make a right. Therefore, we do not think it appropriate to make one contingent on the other. That is not to say that we do not believe that child support should be paid. Of course we do, and we need to do a great deal more to tackle that. New penalties have been introduced to make child support payments more effective, including the power for a court to disqualify a non-resident parent from holding or obtaining a driving licence; or, if the court is satisfied that the non-resident parent has deliberately avoided paying maintenance, it may issue a warrant for committal to prison for up to six weeks. However, it is also of course wrong that resident parents are not meeting their obligations in respect of access to children by non-resident parents and there should be sanctions to prevent that. We are talking about holidays, football matches, and so on, which are important to the life of children and the sanctions regime must be effective in that regard. Simply to say that it would be waived in the event of child support payments not being made would not be conducive to that. So although I appreciate the point being made by my noble friend, we do not think that it would be right to make the one contingent on the other.