Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for tabling this amendment, the import of which I understand a little better having heard him speak to it. The amendment would mean that when there had been shared care of 52 or more nights in the preceding 12-month period, the amount of child maintenance would be reduced. This amendment, which would apply to basic or reduced-rate cases, mirrors existing arrangements to the extent that currently, in most cases, the Child Support Agency will look at care arrangements over the previous 52 weeks. However, there is a significant difference between those provisions and this amendment. We believe it is right that, at the time of setting maintenance liability for the next year, a reduction should apply only if the parents intend to continue shared care. The effect of this amendment could be to allow such a reduction to apply even though shared care had already ceased by the time the maintenance calculation was made. I do not believe that that is what the noble Lord sought through this amendment, but that would be its import. We believe that substantial shared care should be reflected in maintenance calculations. This is, admittedly, a difficult area, which we have debated in Committee and on Report, but there is no clear consensus on what the shared care rules should be. That is why we have left those rules largely unchanged. The impact of shared care on liabilities has the potential to add to disputes between parents, although we would hope that they would always put the benefits to the child before any financial consideration. Shared care can also have administrative complexities. The amendments to the Bill are designed to assist with this. For example, paragraph 6 of Schedule 4, to which this amendment is addressed, would allow the commission to base a shared-care reduction on any future agreement between the parents to share care, such as under a contact order. This would be broader than the current arrangement, whereby the Child Support Agency can reach a decision based only on past evidence of shared care, which can sometimes be of poor quality or disputed. I think that the thrust of the point that the noble Lord made was that the existence of a change in the maintenance level occasioned by a formula for shared care can, in some circumstances, discourage contact. One would accept that there might well be circumstances in which that could arise but, equally, there could be circumstances in which the lack of any financial adjustments made it difficult for the non-resident parent to participate in contact arrangements and shared care. The Bill fundamentally encourages voluntary arrangements where appropriate. It is for parents to determine the level of child maintenance, but negotiated in the shadow of what the commission would provide and the consequences of any shared care arrangement. My noble friend raised the point that if the parent with care is on benefit that would drive the commission’s formula. That of course would eventually fall away because being on benefit would not require the use of the commission in the future. I do not believe, and I do not think that we have evidence to suggest, that the shared care formula in any significant way negates contact of both parents. Certainly that is something that we would discourage. We have always made it clear that we want to uncouple fundamentally payment of maintenance for children from contact, while recognising that shared care arrangements have cost implications for the non-resident parent. The current formula for shared care, which we broadly propose to carry forward because of lack of consensus, as I have said, will continue. That obviously would not apply if people move into voluntary arrangements. At the end of the day we want sustainable arrangements with which we hope both parents are happy. We believe that is best to make sure that maintenance continues to flow for the benefit of children, and, indeed, that is the best environment for young children to be able to have contact with both parents.