Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-153)
MS ADRIENNE
BURGESS
13 OCTOBER 2004
Q140 Andrew Selous: Where to!
Ms Burgess: It is in flight from
this whole issue of—
Q141 Andrew Selous: Running away?
Ms Burgess: Yes, it does not know
what to do. You have got these angry dads groups on the one hand
coming out with the most naïve analysis and misogynistic
rubbish without any concept of how policy is developed, but equally
at fault is the child welfare sector which remains silent.
Q142 Andrew Selous: Is getting this whole
incredibly vexed and fraught issue of contact, in your view, the
other essential half of this equation if we are going to make
progress in an overall manner?
Ms Burgess: I think that contact
must be dealt with, not as a quid pro quo for payment,
but as part of valuing the whole issue of maintaining relationships
with parents in as little conflict as possible and then out of
that comes contact, out of that comes child support compliance,
but not in every case as you will have that small group of people
who, with whatever money you throw at them, whatever help you
throw at them, will not be resolved, but they are not the most
of them. I think that the first statement, I have never seen it
anywhere, I have never seen it put in America and I have never
seen it put in Australia, is just how wonderful child support
is for children, the payment of child support, just what it means
for families, so we have to be far more aggressive in seeing this
as work-in-progress with very high stakes for children.
Q143 David Hamilton: Can I look at some
of the visionary issues, as you look at it. That would mean effectively
that every time a separation is moving towards divorce, every
case should be referred, every case?
Ms Burgess: In every case you
would have an intervention and, you see, this is what they are
hoping for in the family relationship centres in Australia. They
are looking for early portals too. They have just sketched it
out in the broadest terms, but on the ground they are working
on that and they know that you have to get to them early so that
every case where you have an intervention, you look at them. There
is a myth that because 90% of cases do not get to court that all
of those cases are being worked out in the best interests of children,
but it is absolutely not the case, so yes, you have interventions,
conversations at early stages and then you may not need to go
further with many people.
Q144 Mrs Humble: The Australian proposals
are very interesting, but of course their child support system
impacts upon every single child in a relationship that has broken
up. Here we focus on a very, very small number, on the people
who are benefit recipients. In Australia when parents separate,
they notify the Child Support Agency and then their CSA gets involved,
so they have identified these people and they can then intervene
and say, "Well, have you sat down together? Have you worked
out what your issues are?" and deal with that because they
know about them. In the UK we do not know about them. The majority
of people separate and they come to arrangements between themselves
for maintenance payments and they may or may not go through the
courts, so it is only a small number that our CSA deals with out
of the totality. How can we then introduce something similar to
what is being proposed in Australia?
Ms Burgess: I have no idea because
I do not see that technicality, but if they are doing it over
there, it was not always so because they did concentrate much
more on benefit recipients to start with. They have broadened
it out and they have gone towards this system of whatever the
percentage is, that 70% of their clients make private arrangements
and we know that works best and that is really best, and it is
the same as contact. It is much better if you can do that, but
it is done, as we know, in the shadow of the law. It is done,
as you know, with guidelines which of course are what you lack
in contact. In contact issues, for some reason that I cannot understand,
there is no simple guideline which says, "At this age this
is what's best for children", and of course it may work and
every case is different within that, but we have these simple
ideas so that people know what to expect. Once you have that simple
feeling here, as we have with child support, it is a very good
place to start and whatever it takes to make it much more universal,
whatever it takes.
Q145 Miss Begg: A lot of what I was going
to ask has already been covered, but perhaps I can take you back
a couple of steps. You talked about the Australian model and how
much better it is and how long it has taken them to get there,
but I suppose the first tentative step that the Government took
in getting along that road is the new system, so my question really
is to ask what experience you and your members have of the whole-service
approach, whether you think it is working, whether you have actually
noticed a difference or is it just as bad as the old system?
Ms Burgess: We do not have members.
We are not a membership organisation. We actually have remarkably
little contact with the fathers. We do not address fathers directly.
We are working with service providers and that is an incredibly
important role to play as there is nobody else working with service
providers. For example, the Child Support Agency are now looking
at training in Australia for their telephone staff because they
have found, when they measured the telephone calls, that they
chat on for ages to the women, and the staff are mainly women,
but they do not talk to the men for very long and that is a huge
weakness. Then you will look, and I have looked, at the data on
it which they have now collected and you will see that there are
individual telephone operators dealing with the most difficult
cases who talk to the men for ages and often get very good results,
so the whole question then is to look and say, "What skills
do our people need?", who are basically women who come often
from sectors where engaging with women is what it is about. There
are all those kind of practice issues. I do not have experience
from our members, but I will tell you what I do have though. I
raise this always when I go into training sessions with workers,
which I do a great deal, in this country and also in Australia,
if you ask practitioners in family services how child support
is impacting on their clients, who are the men, they will look
at you in this country as if you are mad. "The what?",
they go, "Child support?", whereas in Australia, they
go, "Oh yes, we've done this and this has affected him and
he has got this relationship". They are just not even reaching
these guys. If they are taking it out of their benefit, the five
quid or whatever it is, they are not noticing it. Child support
is not considered an issue by the practitioners working with low-income
fathers in this country.
Q146 Miss Begg: What you are saying there
then is that any questions I have about compliance and whether
it would be better if there was a higher premium where people
could take more of their money, that is not really appropriate
to ask you because you do not have that?
Ms Burgess: I do not hold that
information.
Q147 Chairman: Do you think that the
separation of the disposition of access between the CSA and the
courts, the fact that there is not a kind of one-stop approach
to that important question is a problem and how would you fix
it?
Ms Burgess: I do not know because
that is not my expertise. There must be people who can do that,
but, first of all, it is important to conceptualise it as all
part of the same area and I do not think that that is happening.
It needs that kind of definition and it is not just the courts,
you know. It is not just the courts, but it is relationship work
which is not in the courts, it is debt counselling, it is health.
You have seen the Child Support Agency stuff in Australia, so
you know the Me and My Health for Me and My Kids stuff.
They are small things, they are not amazingly wonderful publications,
but they are a start.
Q148 Chairman: You do in your evidence,
I think, talk very effectively of the need for innovation of just
that kind.
Ms Burgess: Absolutely.
Q149 Chairman: Not huge things on their
own, but small things that add up. Is that absent from the Child
Support Agency in the United Kingdom?
Ms Burgess: They did try to do
a little signposting exercise here a couple of years ago, I am
sure you are aware of it, at the CSA here. They compiled a little
directory to try to signpost, but I think it sort of went the
way of all things and you have to have the commitment of the funding
to resource that. Issues like domestic violence are intimately
tied in here and there is an organisation called "Respect"
which has been set up from the women's organisations which is
about developing codes and practice, what they call "perpetrator
programmes", so if you have got domestic violence issues,
you have to be working with these men. Perpetrator programmes
can have enormous success and that is one of the messages from
recent research, so it is all this stuff. It is not just the courts
and child support, but it is a holistic approach to the issues
families face and continue to face in this process. It was only
10 years ago that it was new to say that divorce was a process.
We actually thought that divorce was an event and now we know
that it starts long before the actual separation. We know that
father/child relationships get weaker during the wind-down to
separation because dad is keeping out of the house or he is sitting
in front of the computer or whatever he is doing. It is a process.
Q150 Chairman: You are in a slightly
different relationship with the Agency from the pressure groups
who are arguing on behalf of the clients. How would you characterise
the success, or effectiveness or otherwise of the Child Support
Agency as currently constructed? How effective, from your vantage
point, is the Child Support Agency currently?
Ms Burgess: It is not enforcing
enough. You have to have widespread and effective enforcement.
Q151 Chairman: Is that a failure of management?
Ms Burgess: I do not know. I have
not examined the management structures. I think that it must clearly
be a failure of management, but it is also the management embedded
in a much wider thing. It is a failure of vision; it is a failure,
as we know, of the connections. The Agency is not closely connected
enough with the Inland Revenue. It is a failure in terms of not
rewarding people sufficiently, of not making it an exciting place
to be. One of the key things about the Australian agency was that
they placed it in the Inland Revenue—now it is not, but
it was then—and it had a kind of cachet about it, in an
interesting way. So the Treasury-type people thought, "Ooh,
the Child Support Agency!". It had a series of very good
chief executives; it was a good career path.
Q152 Chairman: So you think that one
of the elements in the Australian set-up that makes it more successful
than others, apart from the important dimension of culture—and
I understand that perfectly well—is the leadership that
was given to the Australian system?
Ms Burgess: Yes. It is not about
blaming one individual for not leading well. It is about seeing
how you get the best people into that job; how you reward them;
how you inspire them to see this, not just as something they are
feeling guilty about and negative, and "Oh, dear, we've got
to do something", but to see this as one of the most important
elements in supporting children.
Q153 Chairman: That sounds very valuable.
I did offer you at the outset an opportunity, if we have missed
anything, for a moment or two before we close. Your written evidence
is very helpful, and your oral evidence has supplemented that
extremely well. Unless there is anything you want to leave us
with, it has been very helpful to us and we are very grateful.
Ms Burgess: Just to say that,
to me, it is very much about embedding child support in a widespread
policy on separated families. And the final report called for
that. 1974, and he was saying, "We must know that, as a State,
we have to take this issue". If we are going to allow people
to continue to partner and re-partner—and we cannot stop
that—then we have to have the supports in place. We have
to take it seriously.
Chairman: I think that is an appropriate
point at which to end. Thank you very much for your appearance
this morning.
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