Welfare Reform Bill

I move the amendment out of a sense of the need for fairness in these alterations. I should say at the beginning that I am a member of Barnardo’s and I thank others in the voluntary sector who have helped me in the work of contacting your Lordships. After I sent my letter, one of my senior colleagues said to me, ““I was surprised to receive a letter from a former Lord Chancellor inviting me to be a rebel””. I have thought about that. My primary motivation as Lord Chancellor was to get fairness and justice for our people, and I hope that I have not laid that motivation aside on laying down my robes for the last time. My amendment is about a very simple matter of fairness. The government briefing dealing with the clause in its earlier form included the statement, which all of us may believe to be true, that, "““a significant proportion of parents will not be able to collaborate. For example, where an applicant has a former partner who refuses to engage or pay child maintenance voluntarily there would be no reasonable steps they could take””." That is the group I am focusing on, because I do not believe that it is fair to require them to pay charges when they are not responsible for creating the need for the use of the service. The obligation to maintain children is an obligation between the parent and the child which subsists for so long as the child needs maintenance and the parent lives. The mere fact that there has been disturbance and breakdown between the parents is in no sense a reason for not paying maintenance. Therefore, one of the key things that my noble friend Lord Newton and I thought, when this arrangement was being made originally in 1991, was that it was important to separate consideration of things such as contact and other detailed arrangements from the obligation to pay maintenance. That is a clear obligation which, as I said, subsists whatever the relationship between the parties. My question is simply: is it fair to charge a parent in that group? The suggestion is that the use of charging will create an incentive on both parents to enter into an agreement. I agree that in many cases that will be so, but the quotation I have just given explains that that is not true in every case. I use the example of where the man declines to pay maintenance. It is usually the man as 97 per cent of the cases under the CSA are initiated by the mother as the parent with care. There are one or two where it is the other way round, but I use the mother for illustrative purposes, as long as your Lordships understand that that is not the universal situation. In my view, the only question that arises on application to the CSA—the names have changed once or twice but the name CSA is used in the letter that was kindly circulated this morning—is whether the parent, the father, is prepared to pay maintenance: is he paying maintenance and is he prepared to pay maintenance? That is all. He is not asked anything else. The idea that I want to have an adjudication of whose fault it was that there was a breakdown is absolute nonsense. Those of your Lordships who have been here long enough will remember that I had some trouble getting through this House a law reform Act of 1996, which introduced divorce without fault. No-fault divorce seemed to me to be the only answer. I do not believe that any tribunal on earth is able to make an absolutely just appraisal of who is responsible for a breakdown in a relationship. I certainly do not want to put that task on the CSA—not at all. I want the CSA to be concerned solely with the question of maintenance, and the obligation of maintenance clearly arises when one is a parent, nothing else. It does not matter what else has happened. As long as I am the parent and the child is still in need of maintenance, the obligation subsists. That is the only question that arises at that stage. The idea that I want to have some kind of quasi-judicial bureaucratic process that will take a great deal of money out of the system is nonsense. I have no such desire. Those of your Lordships who were here will remember the debate about the Bill—which, as I say, is still on the statute book, not yet implemented. The time will come when it is, probably; at least, I hope so. I am also very keen on what the Government are now saying about the need to try to get voluntary agreement. I am 110 per cent behind that. I believe that voluntary agreement on all the arrangements needed on separation is vital. If we could get that in every case, there would be no need for the CSA and very little need for a good lot of the family court arrangements that we have to have. Sadly, we are in the real world and that is not always possible. That is the simple point that I wanted to make. I suggested when I had some of these meetings how this could be handled. My idea is that when somebody applies to the CSA and is serious about it, the application should be taken into account and immediately a letter would go to the non-resident parent—the NRP as we tend to call him—to ask whether he is paying maintenance at the moment or is willing to pay, and giving him something like a fortnight or a month to reply. There is no need for any quasi-judicial function or anything of that sort. That is what I want. On that basis, if he says, ““I will certainly pay and set up a direct debit tomorrow””, there is no question of the CSA being involved. However, if the CSA is involved to force him to pay, he has the responsibility for bringing that about and the fees should be adjusted. The fees are still subject to discussion. There is no question at present about a strict standard of fee; the fees are subject to discussion. They should take account of the fact that this is the way the scheme operates. The motivation of the Government for these charges is said to be to try to bring people to voluntary agreement. I am entirely in favour of that. But if that proves impossible, when the woman is at the stage of having nothing more that she can to, she has to pay. What does that do? If anything, it might make her not go to the Child Support Agency at all and the child will lose the maintenance. I cannot see that asking for that is an incentive to do anything that the Government want. There are other considerations that I would like to mention briefly. As I say, I am entirely in favour of putting as much money and effort as possible into getting people to reach agreement when they fall out—if possible, repairing the relationship, and if not, trying to sort out the consequences of its breakdown. The Government propose an exception to this in respect of domestic violence. I believe that my amendment would take them out of the hole of trying to define domestic violence by reaching the conclusion that where there is the threat of that sort continuing at the time, any kind of agreement between the parties on maintenance is just not possible and therefore not appropriate in terms of my amendment. Your Lordships will notice that the terms of my amendment came out of the terms of the clause before the amendment that was proposed a few minutes ago. It has the full approval of parliamentary counsel obviously, and a very excellent draft it is. This would deal with the question of the exception in favour of those who have been the subject of domestic violence. I do not think that the Government have yet worked out exactly how they will establish that. I have every sympathy with them and offer them an easy way of dealing with the matter. The statutory provision for charges came in as a result of Sir David Henshaw’s report. He makes it clear that he did not want to see charges as a disincentive to the use of the system. At the stage that I am dealing with and for the group I am dealing with, that is the only possible purpose of it. This does not carry the approval of Sir David Henshaw in his advice to the then Government to bring in the power to charge. This seems to be the situation. It is simple and I am extremely sorry to find myself in a position of opposing the Government. I was anxious if possible to reach an accommodation with them but so far nothing has been offered to me that would be an explanation to your Lordships of why I withdrew from this very principled position. I beg to move.