Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

moved Amendment No. 6: 6: Schedule 5, page 73, line 8, leave out ““The Secretary of State may”” and insert ““Within one year of the commencement of this Act, the Secretary of State shall”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, we now come to the lamentable subject of transfers: moving people from one scheme to another. It is quite simply a disgrace that thousands of parents with care are still receiving money from the original 1991 scheme, even though that was changed by the 2000 Act. New applicants were of course put on to that second scheme and, under the Bill, new applicants will, again, be put on to this third scheme as set out in Schedule 4. In Committee, I made the point that there will therefore be parents with care receiving maintenance money from non-resident parents from one or other of these schemes. In other words, CMEC will be running all three schemes concurrently. That is bad from the points of view of both the commission and the parents themselves. Although the Minister told us in Committee that transfers to the second scheme are now ongoing, it has been a ridiculously slow process. I therefore tabled the amendment to remove the Secretary of State’s discretion as to when he moves people from one scheme to another. For reasons we all know, not least the computer fiasco, he has been extremely lethargic in this respect. Today, however, there is no excuse for such lethargy. It should be entirely possible for the Secretary of State to lay the order to move parents from the two old schemes to the current one within one year rather than, as now, to do it at his—or, rather, CMEC’s—convenience. I would at least expect the Minister to give us the timetable that the Government intend to follow, so that parents can at last get some clarity as to what to expect and when. I beg to move.