Appendix 1
"The following questions have been raised in
this white paper.
- Question 1: Are the key principles and areas for detailed work that we
have identified the right ones? In particular:
— How
can we best encourage access to support services by parents with
care and non-resident parents?
— How can we best make a register of private
maintenance agreements an attractive prospect to parents?
— How can Jobcentre Plus most effectively
encourage parents claiming benefit to make an informed choice
about maintenance?
C-MEC will contribute to wider departmental and Government
objectives, in particular our ambition to abolish child poverty
by 2020. It will operate within a framework of objectives and
principles, which will be set out in legislation. This will aim
to ensure that C-MEC:
- Is focused on helping parents
meet their financial responsibility to their children, thereby
helping to reduce child poverty and improve the welfare of children;
- Encourages and empowers parents in their role
and, where necessary, requires them to meet their obligations;
and
- Ensures the delivery of a high-quality and efficient
service through its commissioning role.
This paragraph sets out what we hope to achieve through
a framework of objectives and principles for the new body: do
you think these three aims are appropriate?
The principles guiding the approach to transition
will be to:
- Ensure that the transition
to the new regime is driven by child poverty considerations -
focusing on support for the poorest families first;
- Meet parents needs by empowering them to make
informed choices and fulfil their responsibilities;
- Minimise disruption for parents through clear
and effective communication and provide a seamless service for
the move to the new regime; and
- Ensure that the approach is practical and achievable
- learning from past experience by reducing the complexity that
stalled the implementation of previous reforms.
Do the principles for moving forward set out in this
paragraph, provide the right approach?
- Question 4: Is our approach
of combining a simpler assessment formula with an exceptions regime
the right one?
- Question 5: Which of the three approaches outlined
in the paragraphs below should be employed to determine child
maintenance liabilities in a case of this kind?
The simplest method would be for the assessment to
take no account of children supported under alternative arrangements.
This would make the assessment easier for parents to understand.
But it might impose an unfair burden on a non-resident parent,
who may not be able to pay all the child maintenance. It may be
more appropriate for the new scheme to recognise additional children
for whom the non-resident parent is liable.
This could be achieved in one of two ways. One approach
would be to deduct from the income used to work out their liability
the amount that the non-resident parent is paying in private arrangement
or under a court order. However, the method used by the parents
to arrive at the amount agreed under a private agreement could
be different from that used to assess child maintenance.
The other way could be to count all children supported
by a non-resident-parent, whether under the child maintenance
scheme or under other arrangements, in some form of overall assessment.
The liability calculated for all the children would then be apportioned
either directly, according to the number of children with each
parent with care, or using an alternative formula. For any parent
with care who had applied for child maintenance, this proportion
would represent the amount of child maintenance due to them. For
the remaining parents with care, the amounts would be purely notional
- any amounts agreed by the parents under private arrangements
could continue to apply.
- Question 6: Are there other
approaches to enforcement that we should consider?
- Question 7: Is the shift from a predominantly
court-based enforcement system to an administrative approach the
right way to make enforcement more effective?
- Question 8: Are we right to give more focus to
chasing collectable debt?
- Question 9: Is our approach in seeking write-off
powers in strictly limited circumstances the right one?"
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