Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I, too, shall speak in support of Amendment 113B, although what I have to say is also relevant to Amendment 113DA in the next group. I, too, thank Gingerbread for its help. I want to concentrate on how Clause 131 in particular, coupled with the wider government proposals to charge parents for use of the statutory child maintenance scheme, will disproportionately impact on women who, according to the Government’s own analysis, make up around 97 per cent of parents with care who are eligible for child maintenance. It seems very surprising that, at a time when the Government are worrying about the erosion of their support among women, particularly so-called C2 women, they should be proceeding with a policy on child maintenance which will unfairly impact on this group. The Government say that the new gateway and the proposed charges are intended to drive behavioural change—yet again—yet in the brief circulated last week, the DWP acknowledges that a significant proportion of parents will not be able to collaborate and that there are circumstances where there will be no reasonable steps that they could take. Therefore, echoing a question I asked last week in relation to the benefit cap, what behavioural change are they trying to achieve in such cases? Is it really fair to subject this group to charges, particularly in the name of behavioural change? The Minister for Child Maintenance, Maria Miller, said in the House of Commons that these new mechanisms are, "““about encouraging parents to take responsibility””.—[Official Report, Commons, Welfare Reform Bill Committee, 24/5/11; col. 1097.]" Yet there is a major and glaring flaw here in plans to encourage both parents—here, I reinforce the point already made so well by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield. The gateway stage—with its signposting to sources of family and relationship support—and the application charge will apply to just one party: the parent with care, almost always female. No equivalent pressure will be exerted by the Government at this stage; for example, a low-income working mother has to scrape together £100 to put herself within the statutory system to bring the father to the negotiating table and to get him to engage in sorting out an agreement to pay. These proposals exhibit profound misunderstanding of the dynamics of child maintenance, where there can often be considerable inequality of bargaining power between the parent with main care of the children, in need of financial support towards the cost she has—both directly in supporting the children and indirectly in wages foregone as a result of their care—and the non-resident parent who has the money, and who has to make the decision as to how much to contribute, at what intervals, or indeed whether to contribute at all. This is another instance of the unequal gender power relations that we have discussed on a number of times in this Committee. As the Prime Minister recognised in his well-known Father’s Day article, sadly there is a minority of fathers out there who are not prepared to accept their role in contributing in a realistic manner to what it costs to raise their children. A 2005 study carried out for DWP of non-resident parents who paid their maintenance via the Child Support Agency noted, for example, that many non-resident parents appeared to be unaware of the true costs of bringing up children; others felt that if a parent with care was being supported by benefits she did not need maintenance—conversely, if she was working, there was again no need; and some admitted that they would put the children they lived with in a subsequent relationship before their own children. In terms of taking responsibility, arguably the Fatherhood Institute got it right when giving evidence to the Work and Pensions Select Committee. Its representative was clear that rather than putting pressure on a parent with care to sort out child maintenance for herself with the other parent, "““The one who matters in child support is the payer. The payer is the person they need to be talking to, in whatever ways they do it, to address his reluctance, his needs, his anger—whatever it is—his poverty that is getting in the way””." In his Father’s Day article the Prime Minister did not shrink from calling pretty bluntly for society roundly to condemn fathers who refuse to face up to their obligations towards their children. Yet this sits uncomfortably with government plans to dissuade mothers from using the commission to enforce that very same responsibility by making them pay for the privilege and reducing the child maintenance that they would otherwise receive. The Minister, Maria Miller, perhaps dismissed rather too lightly the plight of women left to bring up children without proper financial support from the non-resident father, when she wrote in the Guardian in defence of the Government’s proposals that, "““not every parent claiming maintenance is the stereotypical abandoned single mother””." Of course they are not. However, while it may sound old-fashioned, there are in fact many hundreds of thousands of women in just that position, in the sense that the fathers are not prepared, unless we as a society insist upon it, to contribute towards their children’s upkeep. It is the mother abandoned when she is pregnant by a father who says he is not ready to have children; it is the mother where the father has started a second family and focuses his attention on his new children; it is the mother where the father has moved out, changed his address and phone number, and refuses to communicate. A number of noble Lords have probably received examples from Gingerbread which illustrate this. I just quote one of them: "““I have tried to talk to my children’s father about maintenance, he does not agree that my children need money, he will not even provide clothes or shoes for them if asked. I have asked for small payments of any kind to help with the things my 5 year old needs for school. I know their father is working and earning a good wage, so money isn’t a big issue for him. I have said to him that even 5 pounds when he has it would be better than nothing.””" This is just one of many examples that Gingerbread has given to noble Lords. Of course, many fathers are there for the children, whatever happens to the relationship with the mother. However, there is an uncomfortable reality to the plight of such mothers and the children they are trying to raise, which the Prime Minister drew attention to, and which the statutory maintenance service is there to address. That is why I also support Amendment 113DA, which would abolish charges for those with no alternative but to use the new agency, as well as Amendment 113D, which would at least force the commission to engage with the attitudes and resistance of those non-resident parents who were directly responsible for paying child maintenance.