Examination of Witnesses (Questions 132-139)
MS ADRIENNE
BURGESS
13 OCTOBER 2004
Q132 Chairman: We are lucky to be joined
by a representative of Fathers Direct, Adrienne Burgess, who is
the Research and Policy Director. Adrienne, it is a great pleasure
for us to have you available to us this morning for oral evidence.
Maybe you could just say a little bit about the organisation,
what you do in it and how it is constituted and then we will go
straight to questions, looking at the importance of child support,
if we may.
Ms Burgess: Thank you, Sir Archy.
I am very glad to be here, I think it is a great honour. I need
to explain that Fathers Direct is not Fathers For Justice and
we may have to change our name, we are thinking. We are an organisation
that has been going for five years and was set up with money from
the Home Office. We get funding from a lot of areas, including
about 45% of our own income generated by our own work which is
training and publications largely and consultancy on helping organisations
work effectively with fathers, as it were, to see fathers as a
resource and to encourage them to give as much as they possibly
can in the lives of their children in the widest possible sense,
so that is where we start from. We are about fatherhood as a holistic
view.
Q133 Andrew Selous: I am very interested
in your evidence to us. I quote one brief phrase where you said
that the child support scheme has resulted in "some of the
most compassionate social policies relating to men as fathers".
That would not seem to be the public impression that we get from
recent events as far as protests are concerned and it is probably
not our individual experience as constituency Members of Parliament
with the fathers who come to see us. Can you just expand a little
bit on what you mean by that please?
Ms Burgess: Yes, in policy terms
fathers have been very much a kind of hidden area and no one has
been interested in them. There is much evidence looking, for example,
at child protection where fathers are not engaged often as a risk
to children. The whole idea is to try to take the family away
from the father and whilst of course that is very important, you
cannot simply just not engage with this man and think that he
will go on and find another family and reconnect with his old
family. Similarly, in child protection there is no idea of looking
at fathers as a resource to children, you know, who are the fathers
and father figures who are non-abusing who could be a resource
in children's lives. This extends, say, if you look at fostering,
if you look at male foster carers versus female foster carers
where there are no attempts to engage with these men who are playing
vital roles in the lives of children in their care. Therefore,
when I say that child support has resulted in these innovative
and compassionate policies, what I mean is that what started off
in countries like the United States and Australia as absolute
dead-beat dads, "Gotta get the bastards in there paying",
has resulted in people inevitably looking holistically at these
men and saying, "Well, why aren't they paying?" Once
you start to look and see how people are not paying, yes, you
have to treat them as human beings.
Q134 Andrew Selous: Can I just bring
you specifically back to the UK Child Support Agency. The Committee
has just been to Australia, as you may be aware.
Ms Burgess: Yes.
Q135 Andrew Selous: There is a vastly
different emphasis there. A lot of the sort of things you are
talking about they are putting into practice. They realise that
regular payment is likely to lead to more contact and that contact
is likely to lead to regular payment, but going ahead with the
family relationship centre, say, in every Australian high street
to bed this stuff down is not happening here in the UK, is it?
This is not the reality. I do not think that this seems to be
any part of the UK's scheme.
Ms Burgess: Yes, but let's look
at it again. That was not the idea in Australia when the Agency
started. The Agency started and it was bedded in in a very different
way, as we know. It was bedded in by a Labour Government without
emphasis on returning money to the Exchequer, with a much more
generous pass-through which of course is extended and so on, so
you have a cultural difference that goes back a long time and
only now, 15-plus years on, are these policies beginning to roll
out more widely. There is trial and error and they have had pilots
which revealed brilliant results and then nobody unrolled them
throughout the whole country. These are massive changes and they
are part of a whole beginning to look at the need for a strategy
on separated families.
Q136 Andrew Selous: But what is your
policy prescription for the UK? That is Australia, okay, fair
enough and you say it has taken 15 years and it has not got there
overnight, but we are light years behind as far as the UK is concerned.
I do not think we are even on the radar screen, as far as I can
see, as far as the UK is concerned. What are we going to do here
to start bedding a lot of this stuff into the UK's scheme? I am
personally very supportive of this and I think it makes a great
deal of sense, but what are your policy prescriptions for the
UK actually to make this happen here?
Ms Burgess: It has to be done
in many different ways in lots of places, but there has to be
leadership first on the notion of a strategy on separated families
and I believe that that will come. It must come. There is no way
that it cannot come when child support is embedded in that and
meanwhile is doing its best to reform itself. All of you who look
at this Agency are looking to see what is wrong and how you can
change the management, but also it is a vision thing.
Q137 Andrew Selous: You talk about a
strategy for families, but what do you mean specifically? Are
you talking about contact? I hate the word "holistic",
I am afraid, I am not a great fan of it, but what do you actually
mean in terms of practical policies on the ground, looking after
the father, the mother and the children?
Ms Burgess: This has to be cross-departmental.
It has to be joined-up government at its best. It has not even
begun to consider things like the family relationship centres,
but that is not to say they will not consider these things. I
believe those things will be flagged up.
Q138 Andrew Selous: So you think we need
them in the UK?
Ms Burgess: Clearly. What is so
brilliant about child support is that child support is one of
the first portals where you can get at these people. When we talk
about early interventions, they talk about early interventions
in the DfES in a very limited way. They say, "Oh, we will
have an early interventions project", and they mean trying
to get the parents into mediation when they are already in the
court process. By "early interventions", I mean something
entirely different. I mean that you get at them when they hit
the system wherever they hit the system, in benefits, in child
support, which is one of the key times, and then you have a case
management, a holistic approach, and you use mediation, whatever
it takes to get them talking to sort out the issues that may arise
as problems, so you do not wait until they are entrenched.
Q139 Andrew Selous: Have you raised any
of these issues with government? What sort of response have you
had when you have raised this with the Department?
Ms Burgess: The Department is
in flight.
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