My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my two colleagues in this important debate. My noble and learned friend Lord Mackay led the House in earlier stages of the Bill in a commanding and profoundly serious way. His weight being added to this question is something to which I hope that the Minister and department will pay careful attention; that is also true of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe.
I underscore what my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay emphasised at earlier stages of this discussion: the fee money that we are talking about is actually the child’s. My noble and learned friend is right to point to the clause in the memorandum that says that this is controversial; that is why it is controversial. This money which is being taken out of the system should be going to the assistance of, mainly but not exclusively, poorly paid families who are doing their best to struggle to bring up children in very difficult circumstances. That controversy is not going to go away. I pay tribute to my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay and the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, for the work that they have done in the past.
I also acknowledge that there have been concessions, and I do not think that my noble friend the Minister needs an alibi. He has other fish to fry; this is none of his business. It is a very bad change. I actually take a more fundamental view. I have been of the opinion since 1991, when I started on all of this, that charging was wrong in principle. I am long enough in the tooth to remember the period during 1993 and 1995 when we tried charging. I have said this before: it was a
disaster. Why? Because nobody collected any money. They were not collecting fees or enforcing debts, so people were saying, “Why are we paying these fees when we are not getting any money?”. The scheme was quickly abandoned. We need to learn lessons about that. I do not believe that even the new, all-singing, all-dancing Child Maintenance Service—while the improvements are welcome—can offer guarantees that the enforcement will be effective.
Changing the balance of my concern, because I have always been really worried about the parents with care more than anything else, some of the charges which are going to be levelled at the non-resident parents are eye-wateringly high. There are a lot of non-resident parents out there who do not understand the difference that will be made with the combination of a recalculation and a collection fee. I wait with bated breath to see where this new co-operation which is going to break out all over the place is going to start. It is fantasy. A long time ago I was a divorce lawyer, and I know what people can do one another when they separate. It is sometimes quite unbelievable. I am sure that my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay, with his previous distinguished legal career and all his work with children’s charities, would reinforce that. I object to fees in principle. I do not think that they will work. I hope that I am wrong, but that has always been my position and it is worth restating.
Secondly, this system that we have used for charging fees is flawed. Again, I agree with everything that my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay has said, but I want to add a point which has been drawn to my attention by Gingerbread, which is right in saying that if the Child Maintenance Service has the weight of decision in testing the question of “unlikely to pay or not”—to allow the parent with care to join or stay in the service—that is a contestable decision. It is an important decision for both parents. It is an administrative decision which is taken out of both their hands. I do not know what assurances have been given, or whether there is anything that I have missed in the regulations which makes it a requirement to explain in detail why that decision has been taken, but it seems to me contrary to natural justice. In any other area of public life where such an administrative decision is made an inbuilt independent appeal is automatically attached to it. That is entirely absent from this new system. I appeal to my noble friend to go away and look at the provisions in the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008, Section 6(5), where, I think, the Secretary of State is given discretion about introducing an appeal. As part of the undertaking that I hope my noble friend will give to the Committee to continue to monitor all this carefully there should be the possibility of the Secretary of State making that discretionary decision, so that we can have an appeal available, if it becomes obvious—as I believe it will—that it is necessary.
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The statement that charging will induce these behavioural changes is completely fallacious. The David Henshaw report came out of the blue, to put it mildly. I did not know him before, and I have not seen or heard of him since. However, his report was devoid of evidence—there was no evidence for this ex cathedra
statement that fees would suddenly make all the difference, the scales would fall from people’s eyes, they would fall into one another’s arms and they would say, “Let’s agree it is £40”, or £50 or £60. It is not real; it will not happen. In particular, 2 million parents will be caught by the CSA closure programme over time, 36% of whom have been apart for more than 10 years. A charging regime, we are asked to believe, will drive them together so that they can avoid paying the charges. What it will actually do is cause a whole new level of tension within the families. If the parties have been apart for more than 10 years the children have probably flown the nest, and that is probably the safest place for them when such questions are being considered. It is fantasy. I hope I am wrong, but I think it is nonsense. This whole policy is built on sand.
Another point is that for the first time—and this changes the dimension the department is now operating in—the DWP is conflicted about, on the one hand, garnering fees to pay the Treasury debts that it has incurred, and on the other, making proper financial provision for children in lone-parent families, many of them serially disadvantaged. I received an interesting answer to a question I asked. Over a 10-year period, from 2013-14 to 2022-23, fee revenues are estimated at £1.612 billion. You may say, “Well, there have been concessions, and it is down from 7% to 4%”, and so on. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, made these points, rightly, and I agree that that is a welcome change, and 10 years may be a long time. However, that is £1.612 billion that is not going into family household budgets. The department is now in a very different situation; it is not trying to do its best for families, but trying to save money. It cannot successfully do both. The more fees it collects, the less chance it has of looking after these families and the children in them. By the way, I do not understand the analysis of future fee income, but it got past the Treasury and maybe that is all it was designed to do.
I will make two further points. It is wrong to start charging in case closure until we know support systems are put in place. The Minister reminded us that there will be £40 million over quite a period of time; a £20 million-period of expenditure will end in 2015, which will set up the help and support for its separated parents pilots. However, let us be careful and think about this, as the pilots will end in 2015, and we heard earlier that this charging process and the case closure will roll out earlier than that. Therefore it is not just a question of the system being there and waiting.
By the way, it is not safe for the department to rely on the fact that there are a lot of relational support services for separating parents. There are many, and they are very good, but they are designed in the main to deal with newly separated parents who are willing to work together, not people who have been apart for more than 10 years. Therefore the contexts in which those questions are tested and in which the support is offered are totally different. It is not safe to go into this new domain, where the pilots have not been evaluated; I have no confidence in it. I do not mean that the people who are doing it are acting in bad faith; I am sure that they are doing their absolute best and that they are sincere. The resources that were put behind them are inadequate for the task. If we are
raising £1.612 billion over 10 years, surely to goodness we can think about spending a little more money to support those families who will find themselves in that new and challenging set of circumstances.
Finally, how well is the shiny new Child Maintenance Service doing? As the Minister said, it has been in operation for more than a year and took all-new applicants for the first time in November last year. I would like to know what proportion of current CMS cases have been paid in full right now. If the Minister does not have that information in his inside pocket, I would be pleased to hear about it as soon as possible. I know that those figures will come out in due course, because the quarterly statistics are informative and regular, and we look forward to seeing them. However, if there is any way of getting an early rush on how the proportion of current CMS cases have been paid in full or not, I would be keen to see that this afternoon.
Secondly, how much is owed in current CMS arrears since it began a year ago? The point of those two questions is that if we taking enforcement seriously—in my experience that would be the first time since 1993—we must make enforcement professional, efficient and workable, otherwise condemning people to pay fees is contrary to natural justice, bad policy, and worst of all, inimical to the interests of the long-term future of many of our impoverished children.