Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

moved Amendment No. 19: 19: Schedule 7, page 76, line 18, at end insert— ““(1A) In section 4(10)(aa) (child support maintenance), for ““one year”” substitute ““three years””.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, I make no apology for having ungrouped this amendment from the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope—Amendments Nos. 2 and 3—or for raising the same issue as, in various formats, I have attacked at Second Reading, in Grand Committee and on Report. My devotion to the issue shows how important I think it. I believe that the Minister is perhaps misguided not to share my belief. On Report, he said that he wished to make it clear, "““that the commission does not wish to intervene or disturb court orders that are working well. It is parents themselves who must decide whether or not their children’s interests are best served by the provision of a consent order, or by a maintenance calculation made by the commission””.—[Official Report, 13/5/08; col. 980.]" In 2006, there were 148,141 divorces in the United Kingdom and many of those separated partners will have children, so the 12-month rule potentially affects many people. Up to now, the Minister has persistently missed the point. He said when I moved a similar amendment on Report: "““We have always been clear about not linking contact with maintenance””.—[Official Report, 13/5/08; col. 954.]" So has the whole of officialdom: the Government, the Official Opposition and the courts all agree with that. I venture to suggest that the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood—who will have the opportunity to correct me in a moment if I am maligning him—would also agree. The point that officialdom is missing is that parents with care do not agree. Also the Bill has an inbuilt encouragement to tie maintenance in with access. It is too late in the parliamentary process to rewrite the Bill but I make one last-ditch attempt to get the Minister to change his mind and not to brush this pertinent correlation under the carpet as he has done before. In the interrogative mode in which I have moved all my amendments this afternoon, I use this amendment to ask the Minister whether he can produce any figures to show how many court cases have subsequently resulted in changes made by the CSA. If the CSA cannot produce such figures—I think that he said on Report or in Committee that it does not collect them—surely the Courts Service should be able to, as presumably a court settlement has to be broken once the CSA and, in the future, CMEC become involved. I beg to move.