Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

It makes the point that I was making as well—that there is a small number of such NDPBs. We are adding the commission to them for reasons that I have set out. It will join a couple of others in that position. I shall return to the three-year review, but first I shall deal with some of the other points. The hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Rowen) asked whether the position on value added tax was the reason for the decision. It was part of the reason, but by no means the dominant or sole reason. Yes, he was right to point out that it was one of the consequences attendant upon the proposal. The amount of VAT liability that he mentioned was considerably higher than I believe it is. Nevertheless, it was one of the factors that weighed in the balance. The views of the staff of the agency were dominant in that decision. The hon. Member for Angus (Mr. Weir) tried to tempt me back into the realm of the 12-month rule. I have discovered that the rule is that we must spend 12 months discussing the matter. We have done that for 12 months, and that is enough, so I will not go back into it, interesting and enjoyable though our long debates on the subject were. I hope that he will forgive me, but I think that I would be out of order in any case because the amendment on that has not been selected. I am afraid that I was disappointed by the contribution from the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald). [Interruption.] He may well be a fine man, but I found that he was trying to hang rather wider political points on to the amendments. He said that going for non-departmental public body status was all about Ministers shirking responsibility. It is not. I urge him to look again at the rules that relate to NDPBs. In the case of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission, as in the case of similar bodies, Ministers will still be ultimately responsible for what goes on. The NDPB is set up by statute law. It is ultimately answerable to the relevant Minister in the Department, who in turn is answerable to the House of Commons. The idea that there is a shirking of responsibility is therefore not appropriate at all. I will rehearse for the hon. Gentleman a couple of the primary reasons that we felt it was right to move to this status. First, the Bill breaks the statutory link that ties the CSA to the benefits system, whereby at the moment any parent with care going on to benefit automatically gets referred to it because of the interaction between the rules on benefit and the rules on child maintenance. The repeal of section 6 of the Child Support Act 1991 breaks that link, which is a fundamental reason why an agency is no longer necessary. Moreover, once established as an NDBP, the commissioners can focus exclusively and entirely on the task that they are set by the Bill—namely, the collection of maintenance money for children. They no longer have to be concerned, as senior officials running an Executive agency have to be concerned, with other objectives of the Department. There are clear structural advantages in placing the commission in this position. What slightly puzzles me about this debate is that my clear recollection is that in Committee the switch to NDPB status was fully supported by the Conservatives, but I am beginning to detect that there may be some rowing back from that. I am not sure why that is. It seems to be something of a change in position from the one that I understood them to have when we debated this in Committee.