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12.47 pm
Mr. Desmond Browne (Kilmarnock and Loudoun): Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to make my maiden speech in this debate. I speak with some apprehension, because I follow the speeches of many experienced hon. Members who have spoken with great expertise. I have been buoyed, however, by the speeches of my fellow maiden speakers, whom I congratulate. My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Stinchcombe) spoke eloquently and inspirationally, and the hon. Member for Northavon (Professor Webb) spoke with confidence and was extremely thought- provoking. As a Scot, it is also a pleasure for me to follow the speech of the hon. Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire (Mr. Kirkwood), although I am somewhat surprised to find another Scot in the Chamber on a Friday morning.
As a lawyer with about 20 years' experience who, in part, specialised in child law, the principles and practice of the Child Support Act 1991, as amended, are of practical interest to me. As a Member of Parliament for some seven weeks, whose growing case load already features many apparently intractable and frustrating Child Support Agency cases, the review and reform of the operation of the CSA is of immediate practical interest to me and to many of my constituents. Accordingly, I welcome the debate as a timely opportunity to make a modest but, I hope, helpful contribution to the planned review. The fact that the issue is being addressed so early
in the life of the new Labour Government is confirmation that, consistent with our manifesto commitment, we shall put the welfare of children at the heart of social security policy.
As this is my maiden speech, I crave the indulgence of the House while I pay tribute to my immediate predecessor, Willie McKelvey, give hon. Members a flavour of my constituency and share with the House some of its aspirations. I shall try in a few short paragraphs to capture something of the personality of Willie McKelvey. However, before so doing, I am sure that the House will join me in sharing his regret that, having represented Kilmarnock and Loudoun for 18 years, all of them in opposition, his greatest wish--to support in this House a Labour Government--was cruelly snatched from his grasp by sudden illness a few weeks before the general election. Thankfully, he bounced back to health and activity very quickly, and it is the mark of the man that, despite his disappointment, he has expressed no trace of bitterness. Throughout the election campaign, and since, he has been a source of advice, support and common sense to me. For that, I wish to record a personal note of thanks.
Willie was elected as successor to Willie Ross, who retired in 1979, having held the seat for 33 years. My election, if it achieves nothing else, has broken more than half a century of tradition in terms of the constituency's Members' first name. I consider that a small but significant blow for individuality.
Willie McKelvey was a hard-working, reliable and empathetic constituency Member of Parliament. He was a tireless fighter and eloquent advocate, not only for the constituency and its interests but for Scotland. He was a true parliamentarian. Above all, however, he was a true democrat. I know that he will wish to be remembered for his successful campaign to democratise the procedures of the parliamentary Labour party, a campaign that he conducted with my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross). It was a difficult time for both of them as rookie Members of Parliament, but their eventual success is to their great credit.
In the previous Parliament, Willie McKelvey's skills and experience were recognised by his peers when he was selected to chair the Select Committee on Scottish Affairs, a task that he dispatched with ability and no small measure of political courage. The Committee's report "Drug Abuse in Scotland" will live on as a testament to both qualities. He is a man of wide-ranging interests--from foreign affairs to greyhound racing, from Scotch whisky to occupational pensions--but, above all, he is interested in people. Throughout his term of office, he enjoyed an almost unique rapport with all who worked here in the Palace of Westminster. Neither title nor grand office was any bar to Willie's winning way and humour. He enjoyed an unparalleled level of friendship with the staff of the Palace--a friendship of equality with all. Throughout my election campaign, I was struck by the level of genuine affection for Willie shown by nearly all my constituents; I have had a similar experience here in the Palace. In my view, there is no better legacy than that. I am sure that the whole House will join me in wishing Willie McKelvey a long and happy retirement with his wife Edith.
My constituency of Kilmarnock and Loudoun, which is part of Ayrshire, was my home for 20 years prior to my election. I have lived and worked with the people, and
now I am both honoured and privileged to be their parliamentary representative. Kilmarnock, the principal town of the constituency, is an industrial and market town in an agricultural setting. The constituency is famed for the Scotch whisky industry--the major bottling plant for Johnnie Walker is there--but it also has lace, footwear, hosiery, engineering, carpet and high-quality fashion industries. It is at present home to the Scottish cup holders, Kilmarnock football club, and also to the Scottish amateur cup holders, Knockentiber Amateurs.
Since the war, in common with many other areas, my constituency has suffered the decline of its indigenous industries. It now enjoys the unenviable reputation as one of the areas of highest unemployment in Scotland.
Thankfully, the area still has a varied, if somewhat contracted, industrial base and is enjoying a period of consolidation and adaptation, which has meant that developments are constantly occurring. That is thanks in no small measure to the ingenuity, skill, talent and hard work of the people of Kilmarnock and Loudoun. That is hardly surprising, as my constituency is the birthplace of people with such diverse talents and backgrounds as Alexander Fleming, who identified penicillin, and John Lloyd Dunlop, the inventor of the pneumatic tyre.
There is also much to be proud of in the literary field. In 1786, the first edition of Robert Burns' works was published in Kilmarnock. More recently, the town has given us the respected Scottish author, William McIllvanney, and his brother Hugh, universally regarded as one of the best sports writers in the country.
Many of the successful developments are testimony to the co-operation between East Ayrshire council, Enterprise Ayrshire and local industry. Those seeds of progress depend on the improvement of the area's infrastructure. The most important aspect of that is the completion of the major road link from the south of Glasgow to Kilmarnock. The constituency trusts that that project will survive the road building review announced yesterday.
I have three points to make about the subject of the debate. First, in reviewing the Child Support Agency, it is essential to restore the interests of children to the centre of the system of child support. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) reminded us that three of the four key problems that the CSA attempted to tackle were child-centred: the low level of support that the court systems required after parents paid; the disparities between different courts in fixing the amounts of child support; and the poor enforcement mechanisms to ensure that the court orders were met by absent parents.
However, there was another agenda, where the roots of the system's failure are to be found. Reducing the social security budget was a clear ideological objective of the previous Government. Their haste to achieve that objective resulted in the implementation of an ill thought out system. Within two years of the Act coming into force, major alteration was required, in the primary legislation and in the almost unintelligible regulations that set out its framework of operation. From that labyrinth, a bureaucratic nightmare has emerged. The system has lost sight of the child's needs. Its inflexibility and
incomprehensibility have become a reason--although not an excuse--for non-payment by absent fathers, who have taken great advantage of the incompetence of the system.
I refer briefly to the case of one constituent. I have not trawled through my files of CSA cases for it. I have extracted one letter from the correspondence given to me by a constituent who consulted me about a CSA problem at my surgery last Friday. After a period of manifest incompetence by the CSA, the agency wrote to him on 22 April saying:
Secondly, while in no way wishing to disparage or demean the valuable work that lone parents do in nurturing, educating and caring for their children, I welcome the Government's objective of reforming the system of child support, so that all mothers who want to work may be freed from the poverty trap of benefits and can take up work outside the home. To achieve that objective, we require a system of child support that dovetails appropriately with further benefits.
A key to that objective is the maintenance disregard, a point on which I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North (Mr. Wicks), and the hon. Members for Roxburgh and Berwickshire and for Northavon. It is a valid criticism of the child support system that unlike those receiving family credit or the disability working allowance, who are allowed to keep up to £15 with no loss of benefit, lone mothers on income support gain no advantage from the payments made by absent fathers. The Benefits Agency takes the lot and sets it against the benefits being paid out. That policy is short-sighted.
The introduction of a maintenance disregard into the income support system would mean an improvement for the lot of children and would assist the Government's objective of helping more carer parents to move from welfare to work rather than in the opposite direction. A further benefit is that a maintenance disregard would undermine another lame excuse by non-payers, in that they would no longer be able to claim that their payments did not help the children. A maintenance disregard would also provide an incentive for increased co-operation with the system by carer parents. The resultant increase in absent fathers paying would increase the amount of benefit saved. For all those reasons, it is arguable that such a modest reform could be self-financing, a proposal that should be susceptible to assessment by research.
Thirdly, I draw attention to one aspect of the CSA that has received little attention other than from academics. The controversy surrounding the CSA has spawned many interest groups, but little attention has been paid to the issue of whether its operation is always consistent with the terms of the European convention on human rights. A Government who are committed to the incorporation of the principal terms of the convention into domestic law must be alert to the question whether the child support system can co-exist with the terms of the convention's articles.
"If you continue to pay child maintenance from 1 May 1997, the CSA will not ask you to pay arrears owing from the period May 1994 to April 1997. Please make your first payment of £371 maintenance by 1 May 1997 and then further payments of £425 per month by 1 June 1997. This payment of £425 is made up as follows: £371 maintenance plus"--
yes, you've guessed it--
"£54 of arrears."
No doubt there is some convoluted explanation for the letter and it is not the contradiction that it appears to be, but what better excuse for a non-payer could one imagine than a system that, after protracted negotiations, can produce such an incomprehensible conclusion? No wonder that, despite the improvements of performance recorded by the Social Security Committee in its fifth report of March 1997, the figures released by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in a written answer to the hon. Member for Perth (Ms Cunningham) showed clearly that absent fathers continue to ignore CSA payment orders on an unacceptably large scale.
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