Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

The third group of amendments that we find before us, which relate to deduction orders and preventing avoidance—the issue that was rightly raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker)—and travel restrictions, are all amendments with which those on the Conservative Front Bench find favour, not least because some of them are our very own. Amendments Nos. 7 to 23 are clearly sensible. They relate to the setting up of regular deduction orders. It is important to note that there is a right of appeal to the court should there be a problem with CMEC taking money from someone's account. If that is wrong or unreasonable in any regard, people have a right to go to court. It is important to mention that. The amendments are an additional useful part of the toolkit that we are giving CMEC. We welcome them because they are necessary. In particular, I want to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr. Harper), who served with me on the Conservative Front Bench during our scrutiny of the Bill. In relation to clause 10, I think that it was my hon. Friend who spotted in Committee that current and deposit accounts needed to be specified on the face of the Bill to cover every type of bank account to ensure that those parents who owed maintenance did not set up accounts that were not touched by the regulations. It is good to see that specification. Amendments Nos. 24 to 49 relate to lump sum deduction orders. The Minister has already spoken a little about people paying by credit card and paying off arrears that they owe. The orders will be another means by which those arrears can be paid. The Conservatives continue to take the issue of debt very seriously. It weighs heavily on those parents to whom child maintenance is due. They feel that the money is owed to them, that they have been cheated of it and that their children have not had the benefit of it. We will certainly be vigilant in ensuring that the commission is fearsome in collecting that money, which is owed to many children up and down our country. Amendments Nos. 50 to 52, 96 and 98 are very important and deal with the precise point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne. They can both prevent and then set aside afterwards the disposal or transfer of assets in order to avoid legitimate child support maintenance payments. That is important. All too often, money is transferred into different accounts—perhaps into a new girlfriend's account—so that it cannot be touched, and someone then says, ““Look at me. I'm penniless. I've got a couple of pounds in my bank account and no income.”” Such things happen. As the Minister said, people are pretty savvy and have worked out ways to avoid their obligations in the past. The important message that needs to go out is that the net is closing, as was suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Mrs. Dorries), who is another of my parliamentary neighbours. Lords amendments Nos. 53 to 82, 99, 102 and 122 will put the removal of passports or identity cards on to the same basis as the removal of driving licences and the imposition of curfews. The commission will be required to go the courts in the first case to take away someone's driving licence or to impose a curfew on them. It was therefore pretty surprising to me, my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean and my noble Friend in another place, Lord Skelmersdale, that the Government intended to remove passports purely by administrative order and, moreover, not just by the commission's staff. Let us remember that, as we heard earlier, many of CMEC's functions could be contracted out, properly, to private businesses. So an individual, perhaps relatively lowly, employed by a private business somewhere could have the power to take away someone's passport. We understand the need to have the threat of taking away passports. Indeed, I was conscious of the fact that that was something that the Australian Child Support Agency was doing some time ago, when the Select Committee on Work and Pensions visited Australia in the last Parliament to look at how its CSA seemed to work rather better than ours. I welcome that power—it is important—but I hope that it never has to be used. No one takes any joy in the fact that someone's passport or ID card is taken away, but the threat of doing so is important to bear down on those people who try to avoid their responsibilities. The Minister is right in that he and his parliamentary colleague the Minister in the Lords, Lord McKenzie of Luton, were rapped over the knuckles by the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution. The Committee's report states that the Minister in this place was trivialising the removal of passports. He said that the holding of a passport"““relates to discretionary activity—the drive to go on holiday, for example””." Many of us thought that that did not take into account the fact that we are a trading nation and have been for hundreds of years. Many people need to earn their living by going outside these shores to provide an income to their families and to the children of their former families. I am pleased that, after some persuasion by the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, the Government changed their mind. However, I have a couple of questions about the removal of ID cards, which the Minister referred to earlier. The Government want to introduce identity cards. That is a source of political dispute among various hon. Members on both sides of the House. Assuming that identity cards are introduced at some point in the future—not a prospect that I personally welcome—I wonder whether the Minister will explain the position of someone whose identity card is removed. Will people perhaps be unable to gain access to benefits in any shape or form? Will they be unable to gain access to the health service in any shape or form if their identity cards are removed? If they are stopped by the police and the police have the right to inspect our identity cards, will they just get a white pass because their ID cards have been taken off them by CMEC? I hope that there are some fairly clear answers to those questions. If not, there will be considerable problems. I listened very happily to everything that the Minister said, until about the last three sentences of his remarks, when he rather alarmed me by saying that the Government reserve the right to return to the issue of removing passports by administrative order. That seems a bit strange. We have before us a hard fought for, much argued over amendment that we finally got right in the House of Lords, which says that a court should be approached when someone's passport is to be removed, but the Minister now says that that is all subject to review and that there may be a return to administrative orders at some unspecified point. That is a bit like the situation regarding the reviews that will be held on whether CMEC will continue to have Crown status. That worries me, because it seems a little different from the spirit of the agreement struck on the issue in another place by my noble Friend Lord Skelmersdale and Lord McKenzie of Luton. I seek reassurance from the Minister that the part of the Bill in question will not be changed by some regulation or other in future.