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Mr. Bernard Jenkin: As a former member of the Select Committee on Social Security in the previous Parliament, may I assure my right hon. Friend that we were increasingly impressed and amazed at the prowess of the former chief executive, Ann Chant? Will he take this opportunity to pay tribute to her for all the work that she did for the agency? She brought it back on track at a time when it looked in danger of collapse, and she deserves a tribute from my right hon. Friend.
Mr. Lilley: I endorse my hon. Friend's remarks. Indeed, my previous remarks when I mentioned the present and previous chief executive were intended to convey my personal great gratitude to Ann Chant for the effort that she put in, and for her willingness to stay longer than her original commitment when I asked her to take on that bed of nails, as it undoubtedly was. I am grateful also to her successor for taking on one of the most difficult tasks in the public sector in this or any other country with a similar agency. We are fortunate in the calibre of the people who work for us.
What have we learnt today about the Opposition--I am sorry--the Government's approach to--
Mr. Bill O'Brien:
I refer to the right hon. Gentleman's comment that during his stewardship, before the general election, a large proportion of the assessments were on target, to the last penny. I draw his attention to a letter that I received on 5 March 1997, just before the right hon. Gentleman lost his position. My constituent, a mother who was being chased for maintenance, received a letter stating that on 13 December 1993 her assessment was £118 a week. On 4 February it was changed to £115 a week, and on 11 April it was put back up to £117 a week. Is the agency now achieving targets by harassing claimants and advising them of three changes in five months? Is that how the right hon. Gentleman wanted assessments to be improved--by changing them every other week?
Mr. Lilley:
No, that is certainly not the case. We are all aware of problems relating to constituency cases that we must look into, and we know that when we do so, we find that the complexity often arises from the complex and changing circumstances of the individuals involved. I cannot possibly comment--least of all, from the Opposition Front Bench--on the individual case that the hon. Gentleman is rightly pursuing on behalf of his constituent.
In similar cases in my own experience, the changes have reflected changes in circumstances or changes in information made available by one or other parent. The agency is charged by Parliament to reflect the circumstances of the parents, and to bring about reviews
and changes when parents seek them and are entitled to have the findings of such reviews implemented. That has nothing to do with some artificial way of meeting targets.
Mr. Tony McWalter (Hemel Hempstead):
I should be reluctant for the right hon. Gentleman to leave this potted history without some mention of the punitive levels of settlement that have occurred in so many cases. I have a constituent who earns less than £14,000 a year, but he is being asked to pay £500 a month. In addition, he had left his ex-wife the house that was their residence. The levels have been punitive and unfair, and the accessibility of the agency remains gruesome. Will the right hon. Gentleman add that to his history?
Mr. Lilley:
The hon. Gentleman is now part of a governing party. There is little evidence that Labour has yet grasped the reins of government, but it has grasped the reins of the communications system in Whitehall. The hon. Gentleman should ask the Secretary of State for Social Security and Minister for Women, the right hon. Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), how she intends to change the formula to make it--in his view--equitable
The hon. Gentleman's remarks chime with what I was about to say. The Government published a policy document on the Child Support Agency and undertook to make it fairer. When the Government initiate a debate in the House, one would expect them to tell us in what ways the CSA was to be made fairer. Will they place a lesser burden on absent parents and thereby reduce the amount of money received by the parent with care? That seems to be what the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mr. McWalter) wants and how he defines fairness. Or will the Government give more help to the parent with care and relieve further the taxpayers' contribution when the absent parent has the means to pay?
The Government were elected with a clear pledge to make child support fairer, but they did not specify what that pledge meant. We shall demand of them specifications of what they mean. Do they propose to change the formula, or will they now say, "Actually, when we said fairer, we were not referring to the formula at all: we intend to leave it unchanged"? I have no doubt that we shall have great support from Labour Back-Bench Members, to the extent that they are not muzzled by the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Mandelson), in demanding from the Government some clarification of the pledges on which they were elected and for which Labour Members are responsible to their constituents.
The Labour party pledged in its document that it would undertake fundamental reform of the CSA. There are three fundamentals of the CSA. The first is the principle of responsibility; that parents are responsible according to their means. I am sure that the Government do not intend to overthrow that principle; the Secretary of State for Social Security and Minister for Women rightly repeated it today. The second is that an agency rather than the courts should deal with child maintenance. Is that principle to be reassessed, reformed or changed? The third is that maintenance should be determined by a formula rather than the limited discretion that we allow in the departure system. Does the Secretary of State propose to cease to rely on a formula and to give much greater discretion? If there is a commitment to fundamental reform, which of the fundamentals do the Government intend to reform and in what ways?
It is an insult to the House to initiate a debate on a subject on which one has clear election pledges and not give us an inkling how the pledges will be implemented or even mention them. That is an extraordinary thing to do.
Mr. Oliver Heald (North-East Hertfordshire):
The only thing that the Government have announced is an improvement in the telephone service.
Mr. Lilley:
As my hon. Friend says, the only thing that the Government have said is that they will seek an improvement in the telephone service. Whether that improvement was already in the pipeline we shall undoubtedly elicit in due course.
The Labour party's most substantive pre-election commitment was to introduce a maintenance disregard so that people could keep some of the income support--[Interruption.] The Secretary of State says that it was not a commitment, but it was contained in a document entitled "Children First" published by her party which was pretty clear. It said:
What about the maintenance disregard? We heard nothing in the Secretary of State's speech about it except in response to a question from the Liberal Democract Benches. That is pretty extraordinary for a Government who have made a major potential spending pledge. The smallest disregard of which they have talked would cost £110 million a year. The Labour party made it clear that it hoped to finance the disregard by increasing the amount of maintenance paid into the Treasury by absent parents. We had no talk today of how the Government intended to increase the amount of maintenance paid into the Treasury.
I should like to hear a clear statement in the reply to the debate. Will the Government promise that if the revenues accruing to the CSA exceed those for which we budgeted in our spending plans, they will be used to finance a maintenance disregard? Will that disregard replace the maintenance credit that I introduced? We said that if people received maintenance while on income support, they would build up a credit which they could encash if they subsequently returned to work. That provided an enhanced incentive to return to work.
We believe that maintenance is often one of the best platforms from which to enable lone parents to return to work, and it was enhanced by maintenance credit. By contrast, a maintenance disregard increases the disincentive to work. It makes lone parents better off if they do not work. Like most policies that the Opposition--I am sorry, the Government, who still behave as an Opposition--have put before us and which they give the label welfare-to-work, their policy would make people move from work to welfare or stay on welfare longer.
"A disregard will be a powerful tool in our welfare-to-work strategy."
The document was published less than a year before the election. Are we now to understand that all that the Labour party told the electorate in the months ahead of the election was not a commitment, a promise, or anything on which we could trust it--that the "Trust me" Government cannot be trusted an inch?
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