Child Maintenance

CM05

Written evidence submitted from the Centre for Separated Families

Executive summary

1.1 We believe that parents, themselves, are best placed to make maintenance arrangements for their family but that the state has a role in supporting them. We believe that the statutory scheme should only be used when parents are unwilling or unable to make their own arrangements. We believe that the proposed reforms will assist in this.

1.2 We disagree with those who argue that child maintenance is a child poverty issue. We believe that it is, essentially, a parenting issue and about how both parents will continue to discharge their responsibilities for their children following divorce or separation. We believe that the proposed reforms will increase the number of effective maintenance arrangements.

1.3 We support the integration of support services but have concerns that many existing services either fail to understand the complex needs and dynamics of separated families or work from parental 'rights' based positions. We believe that all services must be delivered around a family centred model rather than 'rights' based or 'lone parent' models. Service delivery must be respectful, gender aware, empathic and empowering.

1.4 We support the principle of charging parents to use the statutory scheme as a way of incentivising private arrangements and to change the environment in which the statutory maintenance scheme is seen as the default option.

1.5 We believe that the proposed Gateway should be managed by the Voluntary Sector and could, potentially, utilise existing infrastructure such as Child Support Agency Centres. The Gateway should also include the current Child Maintenance Options Face-to-Face service which should be refocused to provide a team of specialist Child Maintenance Conciliators trained to support parents to make their own arrangements for child maintenance.

About the Centre for Separated Families

2.1 The Centre for Separated Families is a national charity (established in 1973) that works with everyone affected by family separation in order to bring about better outcomes for children.

2.2 We work to support parents manage the ending of their relationship in ways that minimise the negative impacts on their children. Our information and advice services are available to those who are sharing care, those who are caring for their children alone and those who are not able to spend time with their children.

2.3 Our child focussed work is designed to help parents understand and deal with their children's experiences of separation, understand and deal with their own experiences of separation, make private arrangements around parenting-time and child maintenance and improve communications.

2.4 In 2008, the Centre for Separated Families worked closely with the Child Support Redesign Team to help create the Child Maintenance Option service; designing and delivering the training to the contact centre staff employed by Ventura, designing and delivering the training to the face-to-face service delivered by the Child Support Agency and writing web and brochure material to support the service.

2.5 In 2010, the Centre delivered the same package of training to the Child Maintenance Choices service in Belfast which is delivered by the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Division of the Department for Social Development under the Northern Ireland Executive.

2.6 The Centre continues to deliver induction training to all new entrants to the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission Executive.

Delivering better outcomes for children

3.1 It is widely accepted that children benefit from the ongoing, positive involvement of both of their parents after divorce or separation and that children who are able to witness their parents working collaboratively around their changing needs are better able to deal with the transitions that accompany family separation. We, therefore, fully support the intention of the proposed reforms to encourage the involvement of both parents in their children's lives after separation and to support the encouragement of family based arrangements.

3.2 We believe that families, themselves, are best placed to determine what arrangements will work best in their individual circumstances and believe that it is right that families are empowered to take responsibility for their children. We agree that it is right to support strong families to work together to reach agreements that are in the best interests of their children. We also believe that family centred services that help parents to unlock the blocks and barriers to effective child maintenance arrangements will produce better, longer lasting and more flexible agreements between parents, not just around maintenance but, around a range of other issues.

3.3 There is an increasing effort by lone parent groups to portray anything other than formal agreements pursued through the Child Support Agency as being less effective. This is contrary to the evidence and to the experience of the Centre for Separated Families which is that, when parents are helped to put in place private agreements for financial support of children that takes into account individual circumstances, they are more likely to be longer lasting and responsive to children's changing needs. They are also less likely to get caught up in the issue of how both parents will maintain relationships with their children.

3.4 We believe that whole family approach to service delivery that underpins the proposed reforms will help more families to make collaborative child-focussed arrangements for both child maintenance and a wide range of other issues.

3.5 We believe that the Government should develop a statutory scheme that assesses the capacity of both parents to contribute to their children's financial well being.

Providing value for money for the taxpayer

4.1 By incentivising parents to consider making private, family-based arrangements, and supporting them to do so, the burden on the statutory scheme will be reduced. The statutory system will, as a consequence, be dealing only with those cases where parents are unable or unwilling to reach private arrangements.

The likely impact on parents of the introduction of charges, particularly poorer or more vulnerable families

5.1 It has been argued that the introduction of charges will reduce the number of effective maintenance arrangements and that, as a consequence, this proposal will contribute to child poverty. We can see no evidence for this assertion.

Sir David Henshaw, in his 2006 report, identified that charging would:

'contribute to the objectives of the new system by incentivising private arrangements, which can be more successful, helping child welfare through increased compliance...'

5.2 We believe that charging to use the statutory child maintenance system provides a powerful incentive for parents who are divorcing or separating to consider the alternatives to the statutory scheme and we, therefore, support the principle of charging parents for access to the statutory system. We also believe that the level of the charges suggested in the consultation paper (including reduced costs for parents on benefits) are, largely, reasonable.

5.3 However, we believe that the government should consider introducing a sliding scale of upfront application charges for poorer parents with care who are not in receipt of qualifying benefits. This may begin at the same rate, and with the same instalment arrangements, as for those parents who are in receipt of benefits, rising to the full upfront application charge. We have no view as to what income range such a sliding scale should cover.

5.4 It has been argued that charging parents for the collection of child maintenance will increase child poverty. However, when the proposed cost of the collection service is considered against the current statutory child maintenance figures, at the lower end of the proposed percentage charges, 16% of parents with care would pay no more than 35p per week and 40% of parents with care would pay no more than 70p per week. This would not be payable if monies were paid through maintenance direct. We believe that these charges are reasonable and will not increase child poverty.

5.5 We consider that the proposed calculation only service charges are reasonable and will have little or no impact on parents or children.

5.6 We believe that the proposals set out in the consultation document are fair and equal in their impact on men and women.

The likely level of compliance for child maintenance payments agreed through mediation rather than through statutory support

6.1 We do not consider that mediation, in isolation, will provide sufficient support for the majority of parents to reach their own private, family-based arrangements. Rather, mediation should be seen as just one of a range of support and advice services available to parents.

6.2 It has been argued that reducing the numbers of parents who use the statutory scheme will reduce the numbers of families with effective arrangements in place. We would point to the evidence provided by Sir David Henshaw, in his 2006 report Recovering child support: routes to responsibility, that:

'Parents who are able to should be encouraged and supported to make their own arrangements. Such arrangements tend to result in higher satisfaction and compliance and allow individual circumstances to be reflected.'

His recommendation that the government should encourage parents to make their own private arrangements was, therefore, based firmly on the evidence that these produce better outcomes and greater compliance than the statutory system and that, as a result, more children would benefit from effective maintenance arrangements not fewer.

6.3 Our experience is that advice and support which is respectful, gender aware, empathic and empowering leads to greater engagement and greater compliance.

The extent to which mediation and advisory services in local communities will be equipped to support separating parents in coming to agreements on child maintenance

7.1 We support the recognition in the Green Paper that child maintenance is only one of many issues that separated families must deal with and welcome the suggestion that the government should consider the full range of support to separated parents to help them take the decisions that are in the best interests of their children. We support the proposals to create effectively integrated and trained local advice and support services to help parents reach family-based, private agreements.

7.2 It is widely acknowledged that the issues that prevent parents from making effective child maintenance arrangements are not necessarily directly associated with maintenance. These can be emotional or communications problems or they can be practical concerns around housing, debt, work and other similar issues. It therefore seems logical to provide parents with advice and support services that reflect this rather than dealing with maintenance in isolation.

7.3 There are significant differences in the ways that different agencies provide and deliver advice and support and services are often fragmented or isolated. Many of the specialist organisations working around family separation deliver support and advice through a parental 'rights' lens, promoting the experiences and 'rights' of either lone parents or fathers. Contact with these organisations actively works against the establishment of collaborative parenting arrangements and can exacerbate the differences between parents, increase hostility and feelings of injustice and widen the gap that may already exist.

7.4 The other significant barrier to collaborative family based arrangements is that the delivery of advice and support is based around the model of 'parent with care' and 'non resident parent'. This model permeates service delivery in all sectors and is found, not only in the lone parent organisations, but in services such as mediation, social services and legal advice. This division of parents into two distinct roles, whilst sometimes reflecting the preferred division of parenting responsibilities in the family, more often than not serves to burden one parent and marginalise the other. It creates an imbalance in status between parents and serves only to push parents apart and make collaboration significantly more difficult. It also distorts the way in which separated parents are treated by service providers with 'parents with care' being viewed and treated more sympathetically than 'non resident parents'.

7.5 Therefore, whilst we believe that maintenance should be more effectively integrated with other types of advice and support, we consider it imperative that all services must be compatible with, and support, the intention of the proposed reforms to empower parents to make family-based, child focussed arrangements. This would preclude advice being delivered from a 'parental rights' perspective and would be underpinned by a gender aware, 'whole family' philosophy rather than the existing 'parent with care', 'non resident parent' approach.

7.6 We believe that all services who are engaged in supporting parents to make collaborative family based arrangements must do so from a position of promoting the interests of children even where this runs counter to maximising the individual rights of a parent.

7.7 We support the suggestion that advice and support services could be co-located under one roof and delivered locally. This is a model that the Centre for Separated Families is building with its affiliate, Isle of Wight Separated Families, where local services are joined up around a single ethos, delivering a range of services to meet local needs. We see this model as a separated family relationship hub around which parents are offered an opportunity to deal with the issues that come with divorce or separation and build collaborative family based arrangements.

7.8 Each local hub would, necessarily, reflect local conditions and local needs but would ideally bring together a range of providers with different expertise who would deliver a consistent and joined-up set of services. Fundamental to the success of this type of delivery would be a common philosophy which supported families to build collaborative post-separation arrangements.

7.9 Online information and guidance could also be offered through virtual hubs, where parents would be able to access information such as that provided by the Couple Connection, Relate, the Centre for Separated Families, Citizens Advice, Shelter and the Money Advice Service. All of these services would need to reflect the intention to encourage parents to build collaborative family based arrangements.

7.10 We support the suggestion that more professionals could be trained to recognise what advice and support family members need and to be able to refer them to it. This training must, however, be consistent with the aim of supporting parents to make collaborative family based arrangements for the care of and provision for children and must not promote 'rights' based or divisive models of support.

The operation of the ‘gateway’, which will require parents to consider a range of options for the agreement and collection of child maintenance before they are able to apply for statutory support

8.1 The Gateway should ensure that those parents who are capable of making private agreements are supported to do so and should offer an alternative to the 'rights' based approaches that have been used by support organisations in the UK for many years. Child maintenance should be reframed as a parental responsibility that both parents must continue to carry out and the gateway should give this message clearly at all points of engagement with it. Child maintenance should be seen as a part of an ongoing collaborative partnership between parents. All parents engaging with the gateway should have this message clearly reinforced with a triage system that directs only vulnerable groups directly to the statutory scheme.

8.2 We believe that any such Gateway should be operated by staff with a skills-set conducive to meeting the needs of mothers and fathers as well as wider family members. The skills-set should also meet the needs of people who are experiencing situational distress due to family separation. The skills-set should enable Gateway operators to sensitively guide parents through the options available to them for the making of private agreements for child maintenance, ensuring that the strengths of each parent for doing so are supported. The Gateway should be supported by a number of hubs both virtual and community based which support parents to make private agreements for child maintenance. Sign posting to these additional services will increase the support on offer to parents to make their own arrangements for ongoing provision for children.

8.3 The Gateway service should be managed by the Voluntary Sector which is capable of delivering the high level skills set to ensure that the needs of separated families are met effectively. Voluntary Sector management of the Gateway will also ensure effective triage and sign posting is undertaken.

8.4 Voluntary Sector management of the Gateway using existing infrastructure, (for example by making use of the Child Support Agency Centres) could be operational quickly. Staff working for the Child Support Agency could be retrained to deliver the Gateway service ensuring that existing skills sets are utilised.

8.5 Voluntary Sector management of the Gateway should also include the current Child Maintenance Options Face-to-Face service which should be refocused to provide a team of specialist Child Maintenance Conciliators trained to support parents to make their own arrangements for child maintenance. Conciliation as an approach should be chosen over mediation because, in conciliation, it is possible for the third party to offer opinion and guidance. A conciliated agreement could be ratified as part of the overall divorce proceeding or could simply be recorded as a private agreement between parents.

The scale of the challenge involved in moving existing CSA cases to a new scheme and the likely impact of introducing another new computer system

9.1 We welcome the phased closing of existing CSA cases over a two year period and the intention that all those who wish to continue to use the statutory scheme will do so by making a new application. We believe this will increase the numbers of parents opting to make private family-based arrangements and reduce the number of statutory cases.

9.2 The introduction of a new computer system, one that is free of the inefficiencies and faults of the existing system and which will not begin with cases transferred from the previous system, offers the opportunity to deliver a much improved service for parents who opt to use the statutory scheme.

9.3 We believe that the proposed reforms must be integrated with the timetable for the introduction of 'Future Scheme'.

May 2011