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19 Oct 2004 : Column 199WH—continued
Child Support Agency
11 am
John Barrett (Edinburgh, West) (LD): In my three and a half years as a Member of Parliament, many issues have featured regularly at my weekly surgery, but one that causes misery to many constituents, mostly young mothers and their children, is the problem of dealing with the Child Support Agency. That is why I am delighted to have the chance to raise a number of concerns today. If there are any that the Minister cannot answer this morning, I hope she will contact me when she has the answers.
The problems faced by my constituents are not new. I am sure that many of the issues that I wish to raise today will be familiar to the Minister, not only because of her work in the Department for Work and Pensions but because, like every other hon. Member, she will have listened to her constituents as I have listened to mine. They are usually young mothers, but sometimes fathers, trying to get by and to do their level best for their children—the children of the many ex-partners who refuse to play a part in their children's maintenance.
We often hear of Fathers 4 Justice, in this place as well as outside, but, although they are not so vocal and do not indulge in stunts, many more mothers suffer in silence. They need someone to speak up for them. I hope that this debate will help to raise their profile in an altogether quieter and more measured way. The fact that they do not scream from rooftops, crane-tops or Buckingham palace does not mean that they do not suffer as much, and in many cases more, than those high-profile cases that we hear so much about. However, for as long as the CSA remains unchanged, hon. Members will continue to see problem cases in their surgeries—and Ministers should expect to continue responding to debates such as this.
I am not one of those people who believes that we should approach the CSA in a party political way. Neither the Minister nor I were Members when the Child Support Act 1991 was enacted, but she will know that there was broad cross-party consensus on the creation of the CSA. I would like to see cross-party agreement on its abolition, but I accept that we do not yet seem to have reached that stage. The basic point is that the CSA is not working as well as it should, and for many people it has never worked well.
Only last week, the CSA was described in The Independent as being on the brink of collapse. Having already written off more than £1 billion of arrears as uncollectable, the CSA still owes 500,000 parents a total of some £720 million. There is now a backlog of 30,000 cases, with less than half the amount owed to the CSA this year being collected. To make matters worse, the new £456 million computer system, designed to make the agency more efficient, is struggling to cope. With half the total number of CSA cases, that system is just not doing the job. That is totally unacceptable. This is a service involving children, in some cases very vulnerable children, which makes the situation deplorable.
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All hon. Members have their own CSA stories. The most basic problems with the agency can be summed up in a letter that I received from someone living in Corstorphine in my constituency. She wrote:
"I submitted an application to the Child Support Agency in June 2003, but despite several phone-calls to them, I have had absolutely no communication from them at all. When I phoned in, I was told that my case was being dealt with as a clerical case and that the best way to progress it was to lodge a complaint, which I did. I received a letter acknowledging receipt of the complaint and was told they would be in touch. I didn't hear anything further so at the beginning of December, I tried contacting them again for an update on my case. I spent three hours on the phone getting passed from person to person and not one of them was able to give me any information. I spoke to seven different people and each time, I had to explain the situation only to be told that I'd been put through to the wrong department. I eventually got through to someone who said they would leave a message for the person dealing with my case and he would call me back the following day. I waited over a week and there was not contact so I tried him again and the same thing happened. I was told to phone one number then another and then another. I left another message to be called back and I'm still waiting."
It is disgraceful that people such as my constituent are being left in limbo, with communications left unanswered and messages not responded to.
Far and away the most extraordinary CSA case I have come across is that of one of my constituents in Barnton—a case that is still continuing four years after the original application. In July 2000, my constituent gave the CSA all the necessary documents for a maintenance decision to be taken. After hearing nothing for several weeks she contacted the CSA again, only to be told that they had no documentation about her, and she should send the forms again. A few days later she received a letter from the CSA, returning the very documents that it had told her it had lost, and asking for more information. She phoned the Hastings office, to be told that her case was being dealt with in Falkirk. She then phoned the Falkirk office, to be told that her case was being dealt with in Hastings. Even the staff at the CSA admitted that their dealings with her case had been a bit of a shambles.
Eventually, my constituent's papers were found in the Hastings office. The CSA made a maintenance calculation, but no payments were ever made by her ex-husband to the CSA. Rather than pursuing the ex-partner for payment, the CSA simply added the missed amounts on to future payments. Of course, those payments were not made either. Then, in 2002, two years after the original application was made, the CSA finally got round to making a liability order for payment to the sheriff's office. It took another year for a public auction of my constituent's ex-partner's office goods to be organised. At that auction he handed over a cheque for £1,000 to stop the sale and the auction was cancelled—but what happened next? The cheque to the CSA bounced.
All that is rumbling on, and my constituent rightly queries the exact monthly amount of child maintenance awarded by the agency. She advised the CSA that her ex-husband had extra property from which he was receiving an income, and did additional work for which he received a salary. Those amounts were not included in the CSA's calculations. Yet the CSA chose to ignore that. It appears that it never carried out any investigations to verify the claims.
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On 23 July 2003 we requested a full about the CSA findings in my constituent's case, and were told that such information would be provided in 28 days. Despite constant chasers we did not receive that report until 31 December 2003—161 days after the request, which is five times the promised time. While all that was going on, my constituent was not receiving any money. I wrote again to the CSA on 28 June and did not receive a response until, interestingly enough, I secured this Adjournment debate. None the less, four years and three months after the original application, my constituent has not received a penny in child support. Her case is one of the 25 per cent. of CSA cases—a staggering one in four—in which no payments have ever been made.
The delays that my constituent has faced in getting her money are bad enough, but her case also highlights two further systemic problems with the CSA. First, there is a problem with the agency taking ex-partners' declarations of income at face value. There has been a particular problem where the ex-partner is self-employed and it is difficult to verify profits and income independently. I came across another case involving an ex-husband who said that his income was £100 a week, on which basis the CSA calculated maintenance. Yet anyone who looked closely at that man's lifestyle—he had holidays and a new car, and had bought a new house—would see that it could not be supported on £100 a week. Any proper investigation by the CSA would have discovered that, but no investigation took place.
That leads to the second issue: the fact that lack of action by the agency forces the parents with care to become, effectively, private investigators. All too often the CSA leaves it up to parents with care to prove that the income of the non-resident parent is higher than declared, rather than forcing the non-resident parent to prove that their income is as low as they have declared. That simply cannot be right.
The report of the Work and Pensions Committee was pretty damning about the new computer system: £456 million was spent, yet 75,000 cases have been lost or stuck in the system. The contrast is clear. Why are so many cases stuck? Is that an IT problem, a personnel problem or the fault of EDS, the company that supplies the data system? For every individual whose case is stuck, the problem is a major one.
The Committee concluded that CSA customers were receiving
"an appalling level of service."
Its findings are borne out by cases in Edinburgh, West, as I am sure they are in every constituency in the country.
One of my constituents, Mrs. Wood, had been receiving regular payments until June this year, when the payments mysteriously stopped. On contacting the CSA she found that that had nothing to do with the money from her ex-partner, as maintenance was still being paid to the CSA. However, for some reason the computer had stopped forwarding payments to her account. Since then, not only has she never received the correct monthly payment, but she has received a new payment schedule that is totally inaccurate. I would like the Minister to go into some detail about whether that is the fault of the IT system. Experience with the CSA shows that it can be difficult enough getting correct payments from some
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non-resident parents, but surely when the correct payments are made, such as in the case of Mrs. Wood, the CSA should forward those payments, on time and in full.
I want to give the Minister as much time as possible to reply, but before I finish, I want to raise the wider issue of what to do with the CSA as an agency. The Minister will know of my party's long-standing policy of abolishing the CSA and moving its assessment and enforcement functions to the Inland Revenue. Considering the amount of cross-checking the CSA should do with the Inland Revenue, but does not always do, that would seem an entirely practical and sensible proposition. I know that the idea has even received support from some of the Minister's own Back Benchers. I still have not heard a reasonable argument from the Government as to why such a move should not happen. I accept that it would not remedy things overnight. However, it is a serious proposition that could provide the kind of joined-up government that the Minister and her colleagues always promise.
It may be easy to think of child maintenance and the CSA simply in terms of the transfer of money. However, we must never forget the purpose of that money is to protect the many children—in some cases children who remain in poverty—who need and deserve that extra help. As a father, I can never understand parents walking away from their own children and their parental responsibilities. However, we live in the real world—a world in which that absence of responsibility exists.
Although for some people the CSA exists only as a formal means to transfer money, surely the agency's key task is to prevent parents who try to avoid their responsibilities from doing so. That is where the CSA is failing in its most basic of aims: the protection of children. Far too many children are simply not getting the money they need and deserve. Although that is often the fault of the absent parent, the Minister has to accept that in too many cases—tens of thousands of them—children are not getting the help they need because of the direct failure of the CSA to act quickly, effectively or at all.
I accept that the new rules introduced last year are an improvement. However, introducing them is like giving someone a sticking plaster to deal with a broken leg. They have failed to deal with the underlying core problems of the CSA. Tinkering at the edges is not good enough; we need a complete overhaul of the entire system. Until we get that overhaul, I fear that Members of Parliament's postbags will continue to be filled with letters, and their surgeries filled with mothers, fathers and children who are being short-changed by the system. Those people deserve better.
11.14 am
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Maria Eagle) : I congratulate the hon. Member for Edinburgh, West (John Barrett) on securing a debate on a subject that is clearly of great importance to the lives of so many families not in only his constituency but in the constituencies of every Member of the House. We all see such cases in our surgeries, one way or another, so we all have an interest in the matter.
I begin by emphasising how committed my ministerial colleagues and I are to trying to create an effective and efficient child support service. I know that we are not
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there yet—I will say that up-front—and I acknowledge the fact that there are ongoing problems. However, when we can get the new system to work properly and extend its coverage, it will be simpler, more transparent and easier for parents to understand. That should go some way towards making things easier for all parties to accept, and towards changing the staffing emphasis in the CSA from what it too often concentrated on in the past—trying to collect information to make the complex calculation under the old scheme—to compliance; that is, ensuring both that calculations are made and that money is flowing and is passed over.
That is the aim of the new scheme. I will not say that it is perfect yet; it would be foolish to do so. However, it is worth keeping in mind the fact that as the new scheme starts working better it will ultimately ensure that money reaches children more quickly, which ought to dissipate people's understandable frustrations. We already intervene in what is often a fraught situation between two parties—they are not always warring parties, but it sometimes feels as if they are. That is a delicate position for staff in the agency, which is compounded by the problems that were always there with the old system and by the ongoing difficulties that we are having in making the new system work as well as it should.
I can assure the hon. Gentleman that each week thousands of cases are cleared effectively on the new system. I am sorry that that has not happened for the first person he mentioned from his constituency, whose application was made in June 2003 and will therefore have been considered under the new system. I am disappointed to hear of that person's experience. I can say nothing further to the hon. Gentleman about that case, except that if he would like to give me more details outside the Chamber, I should be happy to look into it and try to find out what on earth is happening. From what he said, the situation does not seem to have been resolved yet. I would like to assist him in ensuring that it is resolved as soon as possible, and to pass on any information about what has gone wrong.
Until the end of June, almost 120,000 new scheme maintenance calculations had been made and about 46,000 non-resident parents had started to pay maintenance using the agency's collection service. About 25,000 parents with care had started to get the child maintenance premium income disregard in their benefit. That means that, for the first time, those parents with care will see the benefit of any maintenance paid, at a time when they most need it. If they move into work, they can retain that premium.
Because the new scheme is so much easier to understand, parents are more able to make their own arrangements without involving the agency, which, in a way, is the hidden benefit of the new scheme. Indeed, the interactive calculator on the agency's internet site had more than 25,000 visits in September this year. One assumes that those visits were probably by parents working out between themselves what the liability would be. Obviously, that has something to recommend it.
The new child support scheme is starting to make a real contribution to supporting children. However, there are still problems, as is well known. The hon. Gentleman quoted from the Select Committee report, which
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considered the issue closely, and hon. Members are well aware of the problems that we have had. I shall not pretend that my ministerial colleagues and I have not been disappointed with progress to deal with the problems so far, but we are going in the right direction. Progress is sometimes frustratingly slow, but we are moving forward. Clients and staff have told us that when the new scheme works, it works well, so there is something there that we can aim to improve.
People lead complex lives, and the scheme will not always seem fair to all parties who have to interact with it. That was true of the old system and it is true of the new one, but the job of agency staff is to assess the facts and properly apply the relevant law.
The second case that the hon. Gentleman raised—that of his constituent from Barnton—appears to involve an application made under the old system of child support. I am afraid that the parade of frustration that he related is indicative of a number of issues, primarily the difficulties that the old system caused for everybody. That case highlights the administrative problems of the old scheme, as well as the problem of having to deal with self-employed non-resident parents—a point that the hon. Gentleman particularly emphasised—which is acknowledged as a severe difficulty, particularly when those parents do not co-operate. Indeed, as he said, they sometimes do more than not co-operate: they deliberately try to frustrate the work of the agency. I do not understand why they would want to punish their children in that way, but many non-resident parents seem to want to do it.
We accept that there are particular concerns with self-employed non-resident parents. Theirs are often the most intractable cases in our postbags and surgeries, and make for some of the most difficult cases reported by the media. Recovery of money owed by self-employed people is notoriously difficult not only for the CSA but for a range of other agencies. Other revenue departments have similar difficulties in dealing with the self-employed. The situation is the same in other countries: the self-employed non-resident parent often presents the most intractable difficulty.
However, only about 6 per cent. of non-resident parents are self-employed. In old-scheme cases in 2003–04, compliance for the self-employed non-resident parent was about 67 per cent., compared with an overall figure of 74 per cent. There is a difference, but it is not enormous. Neither figure is good enough when it comes to compliance—both are still way too low. None the less, they demonstrate that many self-employed non-residents do co-operate. Members of Parliament, and my staff in the agency, obviously have to deal primarily with the ones who do not.
I shall say a little about what we are doing to try to increase our compliance work, because it is tremendously important. Achieving compliance is obviously an important part of the work of a large number of agency staff. I could not have said that before the new scheme was introduced, because most agency staff were occupied with trying to work out the calculations. No doubt the hon. Gentleman will know—he will have heard Ministers in my position say this before—that under the old scheme, up to 100 different pieces of information might have to be obtained before the calculation could even be made. That meant that about 90 per cent. of our staff's time was taken up trying to obtain the information, and
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almost none was spent chasing compliance, even when the calculation had been done. I am glad to say that the new scheme makes a great difference to that ratio, because compliance is much more important than doing the calculation if the aim, which the hon. Gentleman made clear he agrees with, is to get money to the children who need it.
At all stages of a case, staff are taking action to ensure that non-resident parents accept their responsibility and comply with the maintenance calculation. The new scheme calculation makes that easier because it is much more transparent. It might sometimes be seen to provide rough justice, but everyone can work it out: the calculation is pretty easy to do. Even before that stage, staff are encouraging non-resident parents to make voluntary payments to the parent with care while they wait for a calculation, so that they can get into the habit of paying and do not start off with arrears.
At times under the old system, by the time calculations were made the arrears seemed to be enormous and were often based on interim calculations that non-resident parents might have thought of as made in fantasyland. Moreover, parents often did not understand how the calculations had been made, which did not exactly promote compliance. The new scheme is a big step forward in that regard. We should, however, be realistic: some parents will always fail to pay, for whatever reason. The hon. Gentleman's second example perhaps made that point.
To deal with such cases, the agency is placing even greater emphasis on ensuring that money flows. Last year we launched a campaign called "Children Can't Wait", which aims to ensure that staff take prompt and effective action at the first sign that payments are not being made. Several options are available if non-resident parents refuse to make arrangements to pay, either directly to the parent with care or through the agency. The threat of a sanction will often, but not always, result in the payment of maintenance, but the agency does not shy away from taking action if the threat does not result in maintenance being paid. If non-resident parents are employed, maintenance can be deducted from their wages, although that is obviously more difficult in the case of the self-employed.
This is a specialist area of work, and since March 2004 the agency has increased the number of staff working in it.In the year to March 2004 there was a 24 per cent. increase on the previous year in the number of cases referred to bailiffs, so we are starting to take more effective action. In cases in which the non-resident parent persists in wilful non-compliance, the court can take away driving licences or commit people to prison. The hon. Gentleman will be interested to know that although only four driving licences have been removed by the court, 28 people who were in court with that threat hanging over them decided that payment was the best way to deal with the issue. People who, right up to the door of the court, do not intend to pay, can be made to do so by threats such as the removal of driving licences. The figures for committal to prison are even more interesting: 15 people have been committed as a result of non-payment, but some 234 have had suspended committal orders. That means that they decided that it was preferable to pay. Improvements are taking place.
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The self-employed are a tougher nut to crack. We cannot attach their earnings because, as the hon. Gentleman made clear, it is difficult to work out what they are. However, they can receive liability orders. He might feel that the case that he raised has not been solved, but we are doing more to obtain money from self-employed non-resident parents who are not willing to pay. One has to apply to the courts for a liability order, and then the issue of what resources are available has to be proved. Such orders can deal only with arrears; they do not cover ongoing maintenance. Even if the non-resident parent pays once the order has been granted, he will not necessarily continue to do so. There can still be a problem of non-compliance afterwards if he is so inclined—perhaps it is unfair to say "he"; that is not necessarily the case, although it usually is.
John Barrett : I thank the Minister for what she has said about enforcement. Will she detail what action can be taken quickly with regard to the non-resident parent when it is obvious that his lifestyle—the person involved usually is a man—cannot be sustained on the relatively minimal income that has been declared? Can the CSA move quickly so that the arrears, once assessed, do not build up to amounts as substantial as those that have applied in cases that have come to me?
Maria Eagle : Obviously, the agency has to be able to verify that there is a problem with the income. As the hon. Gentleman says, that sometimes seems obvious to onlookers. We ask for evidence of the non-resident parent's income. It can be difficult to obtain, but we have powers to share information with other Government agencies that might have cause to hold it, which helps a great deal. The fact that we are willing to take court action quickly can also help with compliance. In addition, the fact that more of our staff now deal with compliance makes it likely that we will be able to act more quickly than in the case that the hon. Gentleman described—nobody would argue that that set a good example.
Having read what was said by the Select Committee, the hon. Gentleman asked a couple of questions about computer problems. He asked whether cases got stuck because of IT problems or other administrative problems. The difficulty is generally an IT problem. Part of the recovery programme led by our computer suppliers EDS, of which he will have heard, is designed to prevent cases from getting stuck, and there has been some progress. Improvements are made with each release of the new code and the fixes for the problems that have caused the sticking in the system.
The number of cases that are stuck has dropped from some 120,000 to about 40,000. That is progress. I accept that that does not help an individual whose case is stuck, but I can assure the hon. Gentleman that if we cannot fix the problem of a stuck case in an IT way, there are manual fixes that can get round that problem in particular cases. We deal with cases clerically to do that, but clearly that is not administratively efficient.
One of the instances to which the hon. Gentleman referred concerned the payment—
11.30 am
Sitting suspended until Two o'clock.
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