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Mr. Edward Leigh (Gainsborough): I have listened to the hon. Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb), and as always he presents a good and cogent argument. I do not agree with him although I accept his point that we are considering many fathers who are on income support and for whom £5, although it seems a small amount of money to care for a child, may be a severe imposition. I understand those points.
However, I am sure that the hon. Gentleman recognises the counter argument. We are using the Bill to try to create a society in which people get the message that they have rights and responsibilities. If one fathers a child, surely it is not too much to ask for £5 a week, whatever one's circumstances? I support the Government on that point, whatever the difficulties that may accrue from it.
Mr. Webb:
The hon. Gentleman uses the phrase "father a child". Let us consider the following sequence of events: a happily married couple have a child and they split up, with no blame attached--or perhaps with no blame attached to the absent parent, who is unemployed through no fault of his own and has to live on £50 a week. Is it right that he should pay 10 per cent. of his income, which he cannot afford, because he needs that money on which to live? In those circumstances, the father has done nothing wrong.
6.45 pm
Mr. Leigh: I make it clear that I do not want to be involved in a blame game, in which we assume that the father is always in the wrong. In many circumstances, the father is not to blame. I cannot give a definite answer to the hon. Gentleman's question. It may not be entirely right to make a father in the circumstances that the hon. Gentleman described pay £5 a week. However, we cannot make provisions that are always right; we simply have to make a stab at a problem. The Government are trying to send a message that even though the father is not to blame for the family splitting up, and his income has fallen below a low level, he should pay something.
If the parent pays nothing, not even £5 a week, it is difficult to maintain real control of what is happening. At least a parent who pays £5 a week is involved in the family finances of the absent child. It could therefore be in the father's interest to pay that sum. However severe a financial penalty it may be in the short term, in the long run, the father's continuing involvement in the child's financial maintenance may be best for child and father.
The debate is interesting, because on the one hand I have been having one sort of argument with the hon. Member for Northavon for the past four minutes, and on the other, we have talked about Bill Gates. The debate is about the child's rights to a share of his parent's income and whether that should be calculated on a percentage basis or whether there should be a cap.
The debate on the cap is interesting because I suspect that the Government were genuinely divided about whether to provide for it. Baroness Hollis's reply to me in the Select Committee on Social Security has already been mentioned. She was obviously debating with herself as a Minister about whether there should be a cap. She said:
It would be dangerous if the payment were regarded as spousal maintenance. Absurd circumstances could arise. We have considered the Bill Gates position, in which someone of considerable resources hands over enormous sums of money. Let us consider the circumstances of two families that split up: in one case, there are children; in the other, there are no children, and there is a grotesque difference in the amount of spousal maintenance. If the proposal is accepted and there is no cap, the husband in the first case will pay 15 per cent. of his income, whatever it is. In the second, normal divorce law and procedures of the courts apply. There is no rule that provides that if there are no children, one of the partners is entitled to 15 per cent. of the other's wages. Extraordinary discrepancies could arise. We are getting into a muddle.
Although I appreciate the debate within government, Ministers should consider carefully before they reject the arguments that my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar presented. I do not want to give the impression that Baroness Hollis simply agreed with me. However, she continued with the argument that she had with herself by saying:
The problem revolves around the issue of whether the child has the right to his father's income. However, in a way Baroness Hollis was wrong when she said
Families Need Fathers put the case well in its evidence to us, which is on page 135 of the Select Committee report:
In a way, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar did us a disservice by mentioning Bill Gates as his story, although good and amusing, gave the
impression that few people will be affected by the proposal. However, quite a few people who in no sense rely on state benefits and pursue normal lives could be affected, because they have suffered the misfortune of a marriage or relationship break-up. Now the state comes in, uniquely in this area, to say, "We must determine how much fathers should pay their non-resident child."
Mr. Pickles:
My hon. Friend is right to castigate me. I used the Bill Gates story to illustrate a point and make the proposal look ridiculous, but it will bite significantly at about £45,000 a year and people on moderate to medium earnings will be affected.
Mr. Leigh:
I am pleased that my hon. Friend has intervened, because we are beginning to have a real debate. Incomes of £40,000 or £45,000 are middle management incomes in many areas. [Interruption.] Needless to say, Members of Parliament earn such a sum. Large numbers of people will be affected. The public have not cottoned on, but there will be a great deal of resentment if people suddenly find that, irrespective of what happened in their marriage or irrespective of a former partner's position, they have to hand over £10,000, £15,000 or £20,000, which they might consider a very large sum, to maintain a child. They will think that the money will not all go to the child--there is a limit--and they would be right.
If people send their children to expensive public schools and give them everything they want, which may not be good for them anyway, perhaps they can spend £15,000, £20,000 or £25,000 a year on a child. However, many people will think that the money will not go to the child, but will simply reinforce the life style of the former spouse. Of course the money will not go to the child; nor will it be put in trust. If it were, that might be fairer. There will be enormous resentment. As Families Need Fathers said in evidence, people consider the proposal a grotesque intrusion on personal liberty and it would never be tolerated if a couple were still together. The evidence was moderately put and sensible.
I hope that hon. Members will not groan if I mention Mr. Mostyn, although they often do so when we pray him in aid of our arguments. [Hon. Members: "Him again."] He practices in the divorce courts and we might think that he knows what he is talking about. He does not practice in cases such as those to which the hon. Member for Northavon referred and he did not talk about people on lower incomes, but he did mention parents earning £40,000, £50,000, £60,000 or £70,000 a year. There are a lot of them around. They may be a minority and they may not be the Government's first concern, but the fact that they are a minority and the fact that there are far fewer of them than people in the lower income brackets does not mean that they do not have rights. They, too, have rights. They have the right to talk about their problems and to speak up about them.
On page 83 of the evidence, Mr. Nicholas Mostyn told us:
That is an interesting departure and we know precisely what will happen. The proposal does not concern only CSA cases because the courts will follow the CSA--there can be no doubt about that--and very soon people will wake up to what is happening under the Bill. They will immediately try to reopen settlements. People who received a court settlement of £3,000 or £4,000 a year, supposedly for a child, after their relationship broke down will rush to the court straight away when they realise that their former spouse earns £100,000 or £150,000 a year and that they can get a 15 per cent. share of that. That will happen, and it will be impossible for the courts to resist. A lot of cases will be reopened.
I think this is a question on which we thought long and hard and I think there are good, strong arguments on both sides. There is one argument saying that you should cap it because it is child maintenance and if it goes all the way up the income scale, it becomes spousal maintenance . . .
My hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles) made that point. The Minister is aware of it, and I hope that she will share her thoughts with us.
and the other argument is that if that family were intact, the child would enjoy the living standard of that father whatever his income, whether he was earning £200 a week or £2,000 a week, and at the end of the day in response after listening to the consultation exercise and talking with people and meeting the 40 groups and organisations, we came out on the side of saying that we should not have a cap, but obviously it is the sort of issue that Parliament will want to explore and take a view on.
That is precisely what we are doing, and what we tried to do in the Select Committee and in the Standing Committee.
if that family were intact, the child would enjoy the living standard of that father whatever his income . . .
As we all know--indeed, there is hardly any need to say it--there is no right to any percentage or share of the father's income, which can go up or down, if the family is intact. It is not necessarily shared with the child, and I am not sure that it is right that children should always enjoy a share of a parent's income if the family remains intact. It would be a strange legal system if that happened.
Why should the state determine how much fathers should pay for their non-resident child when it does not involve the taxpayer? It would be considered an intolerable assault on personal liberty if it happened in a couple family.
That is a powerful argument.
In terms of English law and social experience it would be a change of massive social profundity. It will go beyond, for example, the Roman law idea of legitim, which is your guaranteed right of inheritance. It will go beyond that because it would be inter vivos. It seems to me that you have got to understand the profundity of what you are suggesting.
Perhaps he overstated his case, but not in this sense: the proposal represents an enormous change in respect of anything that we have instituted previously. Before we
finish the debate, we must be clear about what we are putting on the statute book. We are saying that, leaving aside inheritance, children in certain circumstances will have an absolute right under statute law to a proportion of a parent's income.
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