Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I agree with my hon. Friend, because certainty is important in employment; people want to know that their terms and conditions will not be unexpectedly changed or fundamentally reviewed. Those people joined the agency on a certain set of terms and conditions, with which they were happy, and they should have a reasonable expectation that their terms and conditions will be broadly similar in the future. At the very least, the Government's manoeuvrings have not been perhaps as elegant as they could have been, given where the Government started from and where they have ended up. Will the Minister tell us how many other NDPBs are Crown bodies whose staff are civil servants? Is such an arrangement usual for NDPBs, or will CMEC be an isolated case? It would help the House if he would let us know the answer to that. The Minister's colleague in another place, Lord McKenzie of Luton, who is virtually a parliamentary neighbour of mine, has said:"““It is very important that the body is more at arm's length…Having a non-departmental public body with separate governance arrangements and with greater operational flexibility is a key part of the reforms. It is needed to distance the future from the legacy of current and past failure and the culture of non-compliance.””––[Official Report, Child Maintenance and Other Payments Public Bill Committee, 17 July 2007; c. 4, Q2.]" My next question to the Minister was what stops an executive agency from having operational flexibility, to which I do not feel that I received a full and adequate answer at the time. Indeed, many hon. Members on both sides of the House have questioned the need to set up a new body, given that the same staff in the same buildings will carry out essentially the same tasks—or at least with the same purpose. The Minister's argument about the need for this arm's length body has been undone, given that it will now have Crown status and that the staff will be civil servants. Would it not have saved taxpayers' money to leave CMEC as an executive agency of the Department for Work and Pensions and been much less unsettling for the staff, who have been worried by the proposed change in their status? The staff also have an ongoing worry, given that a review will take place in three years, with a promise of further reviews in the future. I hope that the Minister will address those points.