| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
12.7 pm
Professor Steve Webb (Northavon): I am grateful for the chance to make my maiden speech on an issue which, in my short time as a Member of Parliament, has proved
to be one of considerable concern to my constituents. It is a privilege to follow the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Stinchcombe), which was passionate, committed and well informed. Given the industries in his constituency, I was surprised that he did not regard his result as a shoe-in. I noted that one of his predecessors made a maiden speech from the Front Bench and, given the quality of the hon. Gentleman's speech, I am sure that it will not be long before he, too, is speaking from the Front Bench.
When I explain that I am the hon. Member for Northavon, the usual response is, "Where is that?" On the off-chance that any hon. Member present may be thinking the same thing, I will explain that my constituency occupies the north part of the South Gloucestershire unitary authority. It runs from the Severn bridge in the west to Badminton in the east, taking in on its way towns such as Thornbury, Bradley Stoke, Yate and Chipping Sodbury. My constituency also includes more than 50 villages, each with its own attractive character and identity. I hope that, during my time as Member for Northavon, I can play my part in protecting those towns and villages from the threat of over-development which is constantly hanging over them.
My predecessor, Sir John Cope, served the people of Northavon faithfully for 23 years. He rose to hold the office of Paymaster General between 1992 and 1994 and spent several years as Minister of State at the Northern Ireland Office and the Department of Employment. He always conducted himself with dignity, and was gracious in defeat. I wish him well in his retirement.
As for me, I had rashly begun to feel quite pleased with myself, having been elected to Parliament at the tender age of 31. However, since 1 May, two events have shaken my self-confidence. First, I was approached in the Central Lobby by a journalist who asked whether I was one of the new Members of Parliament. "Yes," I replied eagerly, expecting fame and fortune to beckon. "How old are you?" he asked. I said, "I'm 31," to which he replied, "Too old, I'm afraid--we are looking for someone in their 20s." Clearly, I am already over the hill. The second event occurred yesterday, shortly after 5 pm. Discovering that the new Leader of the Opposition is just five years my senior makes me feel decidedly like an under-achiever who needs to buck up his ideas.
Turning to more serious matters, I am, as I have said, grateful for the chance to contribute to the discussion about the future of the Child Support Agency, and I welcome the Government's decision to hold this debate. The fact that there are problems with the agency is clear to me from my constituency surgeries, as I am sure it is clear to every hon. Member in the Chamber. Such is the predominance of the issue in my constituency postbag that I have begun to wonder what hon. Members did with their time before the Child Support Agency was invented.
I make it clear that, like my hon. Friend the Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire (Mr. Kirkwood), my preferred solution would be the outright abolition of the agency and its replacement--as replaced it must be--by a more flexible system of family courts which would seek to ensure that due maintenance is paid, but with more efficiency and humanity than the CSA has shown to date.
A family court system would have several advantages. First, the complexity of individual circumstances could be reflected in the amounts of maintenance finally awarded.
While there is clearly a need for consistency, it is apparent that the current formula-based system is creating a great deal of rough justice and resentment by not taking into account the relevant details of each case. A family court system, operating within a clearly defined framework, would be able to remedy some of those injustices.
A second important advantage of a family court system is that it would be locally based. One of the great frustrations with the Child Support Agency clearly stems from having to deal with an anonymous agency located many miles away. A court-based system would at least allow people to express their grievances face to face rather than through endless and lengthy correspondence.
Of course, a family court system would not be without its problems. Given the cuts in legal aid introduced by the previous Government, it would be necessary to ensure that people had equal opportunities to make their cases to the court. None the less, in view of the fundamental problems associated with the CSA, this approach must be considered seriously--particularly if further attempts at reform fail to produce a significant improvement.
I recognise that the Government may be unwilling to take such a drastic step so early in the new Parliament, however, so in the spirit of constructive opposition I will offer a few brief suggestions as to how the CSA could be reformed in order to lessen its negative impact on the lives of my constituents. The first change would involve reversing the planned cut in the agency's operating budget--which I understand is planned to fall from £212 million this year to £191 million in 1998-99. It is hard to see how the promise made earlier by the Secretary of State to improve the speed with which telephones are answered is compatible with a significant cut in running costs. Given the agency's notoriety for slow service, the cut seems a recipe for disaster--the fruits of which we shall see in our surgeries in future unless action is taken now.
The second change, which was discussed earlier, would be to introduce a modest disregard of maintenance into the income support system. That would give parents with care and absent parents an incentive to co-operate with the agency and would ensure that the children involved benefited--which was, after all, the alleged purpose of the Conservative Government's "Children Come First" proposals.
I suggest that the state should act as guarantor of the lone parent in employment when maintenance payments are interrupted or unilaterally terminated by the absent parent. If we are to encourage lone parents to take paid employment, we must give them the security that allows them to do so. Faced with the possibility--perhaps probability--that maintenance can be withdrawn at any moment by an unreliable absent parent, many lone parents may opt to rely on income support. If the state steps in to guarantee all or part of the payment during the period of interruption, lone parents will benefit as well as children and ultimately the Exchequer.
Mr. Malcolm Wicks (Croydon, North):
It is a great privilege to intervene at this stage in the debate, not least because we have just heard two very fine maiden
I was struck by the fact that, as my hon. Friend said, when there was last a Labour Member for Wellingborough, he was only two years old. I thought to myself that, if he were a Conservative and given a couple more years, he would now be Leader of the Opposition.
We also heard a fine speech from the hon. Member for Northavon (Professor Webb). I must confess that the hon. Gentleman and I have an academic past. The hon. Gentleman was a specialist adviser to the Select Committee on Social Security before he became a Member of this place. He had also the rare distinction of teaching my daughter Caroline social policy at Bath university. The hon. Gentleman brought a great deal of expertise to his speech and made a good case for the family court solution--a solution that I reject, while I accept that it is an important part of the debate that we need to have.
My starting point on child support is poverty. Parliaments have considered the causes of poverty and the consequences for many decades. Indeed, I suppose that they have done so over many centuries. One of the real difficulties for our democracy is that, alongside the causes of poverty that have been well known to us for many years--economic recession, unemployment and low pay, for example--we are having to grapple with the poverty that is associated directly with family insecurities. There are high levels of divorce and many children are now born to single unmarried mothers. We, as a Parliament, are finding it difficult to tackle issues that are even more controversial and difficult to handle than the poverty that is associated only with economic insecurity.
I acknowledge, of course, that there is an overlap between economic and social insecurity. The latest data that I have seen are the low income data for 1992, which tell us that, of all children in poverty dependent on income support, 865,000 were in that position because their parents were unemployed. A more significant group of 1.7 million were in one-parent families.
Governments rightly stress the need to build up a strong economy, but we should stress also with equal passion the need to build up strong families. It is right that the Government are pursuing a twofold strategy. The welfare-to-work strategy has to be right as the first prong. We shall never be able to afford the benefit levels on income support that would bring people out of poverty. Income support is, of course, expensive to the taxpayer and socially it is expensive to the women and children, and some men, who are dependent on it. Work is the best pathway out of poverty in the longer term.
If we talk only about welfare to work, we risk being unfair to mothers. I would say that rule No. 1 for policy makers is that, when we talk about lone mothers, we should quickly talk too of complementary fathers. Unless we can ensure that we change the culture in Britain so that in future more fathers accept their financial responsibility for their children, we shall be in deep trouble socially. I welcome the debate initiated by the
Government today. Over the centuries, women have been left holding the babies and the burdens. It is time to start redressing that balance.
We have heard much about the performance of the Child Support Agency. I want to ask Ministers a question, although I do not think that they can answer it--the previous Administration could not. I know about the performance indicators and the CSA but, at the more important end, what proportion of parents with care--that is the jargon, which usually means mothers on income support--are receiving maintenance? I emphasise the word "receiving". No one in the previous Parliament could tell me. My guess is that the proportion is less than one third. We need to know that. If we cannot supply the data, we need research on the matter, otherwise the performance indicators are misleading.
I have another question. How many maintenance assessments made lead to maintenance being paid? When I look at the performance indicators, I see encouraging statistics about assessments, but I see very discouraging statistics about money being paid, in full or at all. We need more data if we are to have a proper debate.
I disagree with those who argue--it is very much a men-dominated lobby--that we should scrap the CSA. I do not believe that to be the case. I say to our Liberal Democrat friends that if the court-based solution is the answer now, why was it not the answer when we had a court-based solution? Why did only one third of mothers get maintenance, and some of it in small amounts of money and irregularly?
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |