Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

moved Amendment No. 7: 7: Schedule 6, page 74, line 39, leave out ““paragraph”” and insert ““Schedule”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendments Nos. 8 to 18. I drafted this raft of amendments because, on my reconsideration of Schedule 6, I found it more than a little confusing. As the part of the Bill that defines the powers of the new body—CMEC—to use information, it is important that there be clarity. By substituting every reference to ““paragraph”” with the words on the Marshalled List—I changed them at the last minute to ““Schedule””—I seek to ensure that the work of CMEC is tied into a relationship with the work of HMRC. Without that relationship, the whole operation falls apart. I drafted the amendments in response to information recently received from a Question asked by my honourable friend Andrew Selous in another place. He inquired, "““what access HM Revenue and Customs staff seconded to the Child Support Agency have to HM Revenue and Customs data systems while on secondment””.—[Official Report, Commons, 16/5/08; cols. 1849W-50W.]" The answer was disappointing—it was ““none””. If information is not provided regularly and promptly by HMRC, the whole child support scheme is blown out of the water. One of the old CSA’s problems that must not be repeated was the time that it took to sort out cases. A way to prevent delays in calculating child maintenance would be, of course, through data sharing. As the Treasury already has the information regarding the non-resident parent’s income, is it not a waste of time and valuable resources for CMEC, or whatever child maintenance agency it happens to be, to duplicate this work by arduously investigating the non-resident parent? Sharing of information between the two bodies would have another fortuitous effect of preventing any parent from purposely concealing income to engender low maintenance payments, because CMEC could check its figures against those held by the Treasury. It is important, as I hope noble Lords will agree, that the Minister should give assurances that, should there be difficulty in the provision of information, this joined-up government, as is so often claimed, will not be as dysfunctional as I suspect that it is at the moment. We already know that it is not unusual for employees of HMRC to be seconded to the CSA or any of the regional enforcement teams. I assume that this is done for one of two purposes. The first is to advise on the working of the formula in Schedule 4 and the second is to correlate the actual earnings of the non-resident parent shown by their PAYE returns, with their earnings as stated to CMEC. But thanks to my honourable friend’s Question, we know that that is verboten to those seconded HMRC employees, although it would have been of real use to the commission. Why are they seconded if they cannot have access to their former colleagues in HMRC and to the tax files that they previously handled on a daily basis? This can only exacerbate the problems of the very slow speed with which the CSA has operated until now, which is one of the main reasons why it has developed such a bad name. These secondees can scarcely be expected to have much, if any, knowledge of the intricacies of child maintenance. I cannot accept the Minister’s anticipated response that they do not have to. Will they really have no direct contact with parents? That is difficult to believe. In the real world when a parent telephones with a query or complaint, will not the operator say, ““Hold on a minute, I’ll transfer you to the person dealing with your case””? We know that the parent’s emotions can run high at this point. What training is given to the secondees? They will certainly need it in the scenario that I have described. All members of staff at CMEC need to be properly qualified to deal with the specifics of child maintenance. To sum up, the purpose of the amendment is to ask, given the department’s Answer to my honourable friend: what use is the secondment of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs staff to CMEC? I beg to move.