Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

There has been no dithering. Let me do this again. We introduced the NDPB proposal, which was welcomed by the staff of the agency who support the Bill, approve of the direction we are going in and are looking forward to working for the new organisation. The one thing they said was, ““This means that we will lose our civil service status.”” Initially, it did, but we considered what they said and have been able to restore their civil service status. That has enhanced the staff's morale, and if the hon. Lady cares to go to one of the CSA offices and asks for herself, she will find that that is the case. Staff to whom I have spoken—I have spoken to many hundreds—support the Bill and the proposed change. They are very pleased at the decision we were able to make on the retention of their civil service status, so I can tell the House that the effect of the Bill and the subsequent change we made on status have substantially enhanced staff morale. As I made clear during earlier stages of the Bill's passage—I am pleased to note that Opposition Members have echoed me on this—the difficulties experienced by the agency in the past have resulted from the failure of current policy and structure, not as a result of any action or inaction by the agency's staff, who remain its most important resource. Throughout the history of the agency, staff have time and again proved to be dedicated to providing the best service to all clients, both parents with care and non-resident parents. The staff of the agency are absolutely essential to the success of these reforms and, like all of us, what they really want is to be given the right tools to enable them simply to get on with the job of collecting the maintenance and seeing it flow to children. As we developed our proposals for reform and as I have said before, it became increasingly clear that the agency's staff did have concerns about the loss of civil service status. Perceptions are important, and it was in no one's interests for us to put our reforms at risk through unnecessarily destabilising those at the front end of delivering those important reforms. This change to a Crown body will therefore enable staff to remain civil servants, and it allows them to look forward to, rather than have concerns about, the commission's launch. There are a number of amendments consequential to this change. For example, as staff will now remain civil servants, there is no need to apply the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 1981 and 2006, and as a result, the clause in question can now be removed. Additionally, we recognise that over time, the advantages of Crown status in general might recede, so we intend to review the commission's status after three years. If the review concludes that Crown status is no longer necessary or advantageous, the amendments provide an order-making power to make the necessary changes, subject to affirmative procedure. However, at that point, as now, the views of the staff will be important in determining for us whether we decide to remove Crown status.