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Mr. Tim Smith: The hon. Gentleman has given us an interesting description of recent social trends and many of the aspects that he describes are deeply worrying. Is he suggesting that the social security system has been the cause of those trends? I wonder what he thinks we should do about them, if anything. How should the social security system respond to them? He said that we are spending too much on social security, so what changes do we need to make?
Mr. Wicks: I shall deal with the Child Support Agency and how we can create more effectiveness and fairness later. In direct response to the hon. Gentleman's
thoughtful question, however, I do not believe that our social security arrangements contribute to family breakdown, although I recognise that there is an interesting debate to be had on that point.
At the moment, we seem to spend an awful lot of energy, time, legislation and public money on the consequences of family breakdown. The House of Commons Library gave me some figures, which show that the public costs of divorce are about £4 billion every year. Most of that is made up of social security--income support and so forth--but some is legal aid and the impact on the health service. How much money are we spending trying to save marriages and support family relationships? We spend money on Relate and other marriage guidance services.
I want a shift of emphasis towards trying to support and help relationships in trouble, rather than spending all our energy and public resources on breakdown when it occurs. As a long-standing advocate of a family policy strategy, I would certainly say that we have not got the balance right.
I am arguing that the social revolution of family change that we are in the midst of has not been without victims. It has not been a bloodless revolution--there are very few such revolutions. Victims come in all shapes and sizes and, of course, include many men, not least those who find that they are unable to continue a relationship with their children.
In financial terms, the main victims have always been, and remain, the women and children. It has been a case of women and children last in that aspect of family politics. We see that in the poverty statistics and in the fact that, in the main--of course, there are exceptions--it is women and children who have to depend on the state and on income support. One million one-parent families are drawing income support.
Whatever our criticism of the operation of the CSA--being a passionate believer in the principle of parental responsibility, I am among the foremost critics of the workings of that agency in practice--we must remember that the old system simply did not work. Anyone who advocates turning back the clock to a court-based system has to confront the data and the evidence that show that it was a failure. It delivered maintenance to only about one third of children.
Ms Lynne:
I agree that the old system of the liable relatives unit, in particular, was a failure. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, in terms of cost, there is not much to choose between the CSA and the old system? Some figures that I have obtained even suggest that the old liable relatives unit was far most cost-effective in saving the taxpayer money. Although I would not want a return to that unit--I would like a unified family court system, in which every case was assessed individually--I want us to get away from the formula system.
Mr. Wicks:
I understand the hon. Lady's argument, but I do not support it. We cannot return to that sort of court system, although I know that the hon. Lady denies it.We need to think hard about ways of bringing greater sensitivity and justice into the system. I shall deal with that briefly later, if there is time.
It is a pity that we do not know more about the workings of the old maintenance system. I do not think that it was researched thoroughly and I have never seen a proper report on it. Our public debates on its pros and cons would be advanced if we had more information.
I have already hinted at the argument that, given the complexity of human and family relationships, developing an effective child support or maintenance policy was always going to be difficult. Although those of us who had the opportunity to study the Australian andNew Zealand systems of child support recently were impressed by aspects of those systems--certainly by the Australian system--even in those societies the systems have been immensely controversial and the subject of the majority of contributions to parliamentarians' postbags, as in this country.
I do not think that I say this merely with the benefit of hindsight--the case was argued at the time--but the Child Support Agency should have been introduced in a far more sensitive way. Ideally--in the politics of Thatcherism it was never going to happen--the emphasis should have been placed on child support as social policy, not on the mean-minded morality that it quickly became when it was introduced by the former Prime Minister, then Mrs. Thatcher. After all, it is called child support; it should have been genuine child support. I am becoming increasingly concerned about the matter because, in a sense, we have missed an historic opportunity for a proper public debate about child support and the obligations of parents to their children.
I can think of two questions that should have been central to that debate--there are probably others. First, how, in the great majority of cases, do we enable both parents to share in the care and maintenance of their children in turbulent family times? There will always be exceptions when men are violent and so forth.
I have reviewed briefly some of the demographics, but my argument is that, sadly, turbulent family times will not go away in the next 10 years. If--this may now be true--only about 50 per cent. of children will spend all their childhood in what we once would have called the traditional family and are born to parents who are married to one another and stay married until the children become adult, these issues do not merely concern a minority of our people and our children, but are central. Despite divorce and the phenomenon of children being born outside wedlock, how do we enable both parents to share in the care and maintenance of their children? That is a central question. Hon. Members will notice that I said care and maintenance. It is about not merely money and cash, but parental responsibility in a wider sense.
Secondly, how do we avoid the trends becoming forces for child poverty and disadvantage? Instead of having that sensible debate, we had Thatcherite mean-mindedness posing as morality. It was led by the then Prime Minister. I well remember her speech to the National Children's Home. That speech and her emphasis on parental responsibility, which she tackled in her own particular way, was as much a surprise to Social Security Ministers as to the rest of us. They did not see the policy coming--they saw it as a hand grenade rolling towards them, with the pin half pulled out. The Treasury then seized the opportunity--it saw the policy as a major way of raising revenue--and thwarted the Department of Social Security when, I suspect, it was arguing that there should be a disregard, as we call it in technical language, to enable
mothers on income support at least to get some child support so that their net incomes and the welfare of their children could be enhanced.
The combination of the then Prime Minister's policy and the Treasury seizing the opportunity led to the bad start to child maintenance from which we have not recovered thus far, and from which it will be difficult to recover. I refer to the quite extraordinary catastrophe that the Child Support Agency quickly became. It takes months to make assessments, it has a huge error rate and it is insensitive to those who are trying to communicate with it. I do not have the opportunity today to discuss the Child Support Agency in great detail, but it is appropriate--not least because £16 million of the supplementary estimate that we are being asked to approve today is for running the Child Support Agency--to ask some questions of the Under-Secretary of State.
Will the Minister give hon. Members an up-to-date report on, and the accuracy of, the time taken to undertake the assessments and enforcement within the agency?I believe that such an update would be most helpful. Will the Minister also tell hon. Members how much child support is now being collected and the projections for the coming financial year? In addition, how much of that money will go to the Exchequer and how much of it will go to the parent with care--normally, but not always, the mother?
Does the Minister have anything to say about improving, or developing the human face of, the Child Support Agency, given its reputation for insensitivity? Are there ways in which the people dealing with the agency--whether they are the mothers, usually the parents with care, or the fathers, the so-called absent parents--can be made to feel that someone at the end of the telephone line understands their case and can discuss it with them in a human way?
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