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Mr. Frank Field: Will my father--will my hon. Friend give way? The Select Committee on Social Security has suggested that we use the word "father".
Mr. Wicks: I am glad that my hon. Friend confirmed that I am not his father--if I were, I would struggle to pay maintenance on him. As nine out of 10 parents with
care are mothers--and, therefore, nine out of 10 absent parents are fathers--we could often use the term "father". However, we must allow for the reverse situation.
Ms Lynne: I suggest that the term "liable parent" could be used instead of the terms "absent parent" or "father". Some liable parents--only a few--are mothers.
Mr. Wicks: I take that important point.
Many of the fathers who write to me or to other hon. Members about grievances to do with child support are often doing their best to pay the child maintenance. However, they find that, when there is a change in their circumstances--for example, a postman may have a higher rate of pay over Christmas but then wants to tell the Child Support Agency that his wages have decreased--it is enormously difficult to communicate with the agency. For example, they can never find one person at the end of the telephone line who will take their point, put it into the system and report back to them in a decent way to say that their assessment has been varied.
We all have the right to expect that kind of obvious sensitivity when we are dealing with a bank or with a building society--I am not saying that we always get it from those institutions--and we want to bring it into the workings of the Child Support Agency. Many men feel aggrieved--and justifiably so--and we need to allow for that in any reforms of the agency.
Many mothers--the parents with care--also have grievances about the way in which the Child Support Agency has not delivered. I shall quote a letter--with care as I want to protect the identity of the woman--from a mother who has recently come to see me at the House of Commons about her situation. She is a young mother with a son, and she was on income support at one stage and contacted the Child Support Agency. She has since found a full-time job in London at a reasonable, but not generous, level of pay. She lives in the home counties. For the past two or three years she has been trying to get the Child Support Agency to find the father of her child so that he will contribute some maintenance. In many ways, she illustrates the kind of benefit-to-work strategy of which we are all in favour. She has a tough life.Her letter states:
She has told me that she has not received any maintenance payments from the man since she left him. She also told me that this man has four other children, by two other relationships, and that he pays maintenance towards none of the children--a fact that he openly laughs about.
I shall not go into too much detail about the mother and her situation, except to say that, for two or three years, she has been trying to get the Child Support Agency to act. She told me in our meeting that she thought that the Child Support Agency was there to help her and her son, and that she cannot understand why it has not delivered. I was appalled when I looked at some of the correspondence on this issue between the Child Support Agency and another hon. Member. That woman knew where the man was, knew that he was in employment and
believed that he earned about £400 a week. She gave the Child Support Agency the man's address and the agency wrote to the address. The man or his new girlfriend scribbled on the back of the envelope, "Not known at this address" and the Child Support Agency told the woman, "I am sorry; he is not known at that address." If that is the sophistication of the Child Support Agency, we are in deep trouble.
The woman rang up the Child Support Agency one day to say, "I can tell you that he is in employment, because I have heard that he is." The agency staff said, "We shall try to trace the employer," but later told her, "I am sorry; we cannot trace the employer." The woman said,"Hold on a moment, I shall call you back." She made a few telephone calls and found out where the man was working--on a highway, doing construction work.She told the Child Support Agency all about it, but still there was no action.
That story lasted several years. Eventually, the Child Support Agency managed to track down the man and produced an interim maintenance assessment, but made a procedural mistake and had to withdraw it. Two or three years later, the man has paid no maintenance towards that little boy or any of his four other children.
When the woman first approached the agency, she was told by the man from the agency on the telephone, "It will be difficult; he is self-employed. If I were you, I wouldn't bother." The Child Support Act 1991, passed by Parliament with much support on both sides of the House, is not delivering to that woman and her child.
Generalisations are unfair; I know that the agency has tracked down some such men, but suspicion remains that the agency regards as a soft touch men in secure employment in a major private company or in the public sector--teachers, police officers and so on--and pursues them to obtain more money from them, but that many men in difficult cases continue to get away with it. Some fathers are laughing at Parliament, at the agency and at the mothers and their children, saying, "I won't pay anything. I would rather go to prison than pay anything. They will never catch me," and continue to get away with it. That is not what Parliament intended. It has brought the Child Support Agency into grave disrepute because people do not regard it as effective social policy or effective child support.
As part of Labour's general review of social security, we have been reconsidering the operation of the child support system. We reaffirm easily and clearly our principled support for the important principle of parental responsibility, but we are angry and worried that that decent principle--indeed, a guiding principle in the turbulent family times in which we find ourselves--is brought into disrepute by the continuing thoroughly bad practice of the Child Support Agency.
We reaffirm our commitment to the principle of introducing a disregard so that mothers who are on income support, every penny of whose child maintenance is currently taken away from their income support, obtain some net income and net benefit from it. We are not in a position to say when the disregard might be introduced or the amount because, obviously, that depends on total commitments and other spending priorities, but we reaffirm that important principle. If the public and some fathers--some of the so-called "absent parents"--could be sure that a certain fraction of their child maintenance
went directly into the pockets of mothers and benefited their own children, we would start to turn the position around and bring what is at the moment a mean-minded piece of policy into the true province of social policy. That is the challenge.
In considering in more detail the workings of the Child Support Agency, Opposition Members have two major objectives--fairness and efficiency.
A disregard would be an important step forward in fairness. People would regard that as fair to the taxpayer, because the taxpayer would continue to benefit from most of the extra revenue coming in. We have no quarrel with that; the taxpayer has a major interest. The taxpayer is not an anonymous person but often a mother or father, struggling to bring up children and resenting having to contribute too much to other people's children.We acknowledge that the taxpayer has a legitimate interest, but we need to strike a fairer balance between the interests of taxpayers and the interests of mothers and their children. We shall strike that balance.
We need to review the operations of the Child Support Agency to seek a way to introduce a greater sense of independence and fairness into the system. At the moment, people feel that they are dealing with a monolithic agency--a grey, bureaucratic agency--that can never deal with them in the round. It would be a step in the right direction to find a way to allow people who feel a sense of grievance that they are not being treated properly or whose family position is so complex that they do not believe that the formula can deal with them properly, an independent review or adjudication. We are investigating that in detail.
Greater efficiency is needed. It is nonsensical that it takes months to process assessments and that, in the case that I described of the young mother struggling to do her best for her child, the system is so ineffective that, despite being given all the clues, all the details and all the addresses by that woman, the agency cannot yet find that man and make him pay maintenance. We need greater effectiveness.
"As a working mother, my day starts at 7.40 am when I leave for work; I don't get home until 7.30, when I collect my son from the childminder's. I then return home and have to do all the household chores. This is not a situation I deliberately created--I was forced to leave my son's father because he is a very violent man and I feared for our safety. I even had to have a non-molestation order served against him."
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