Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

The history of the status of the commission in the Bill says a great deal about leadership, or the lack of it. We have seen a history of attempts to shirk responsibility and of dithering. First, on the point about shirking responsibility, it was not by chance that Lord McKenzie talked about distancing from failure. The change is not an attempt to distance the new commission from failure, but an attempt by the Government to distance themselves from the work of child support bodies in this country. We know that over the years there has been a litany of failure in the Child Support Agency, which was not the fault of the staff but was, if anything, the fault of the House. The Bills that have been passed have not succeeded and the computers that have been purchased have not worked. We all know, looking at the work of the CSA, that nobody could be proud of it. There have been some improvements over time, but the fact remains that it has a sad history. I am convinced that the Government originally set up the commission as a non-departmental public body—it was not part of the state and did not have civil servants working for it—as an attempt to distance the Government from a body that had failed in the past and from a new body that risked failure in the future. The history of child support in this country has shown that it has proved extremely difficult to get parents to pay for their children, particularly parents who do not have very high incomes. This measure is therefore an example of an attempt to shirk responsibility. I do not think that it is right that the Government should do that. If they are performing an executive function, which is what this is all about, it should be carried out by an executive body. The staff employed by the executive body should be civil servants, as they are now. Such an attempt to pretend that the body is nothing to do with the Government is part of the ““Not me, guv”” culture and it is wrong. Governments should not do such things. Ministers should take responsibility for the functions that their Departments and their civil servants deal with, and they should not try to shirk them in the way that the Bill attempts to do.