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[The Sitting was suspended for a Division in the House from 5.38 to 5.49 pm.]
Baroness Verma moved Amendment No. 6:
The noble Baroness said: The amendments attempt to secure a little more clarity and precision in the Bill’s description of the commission. The past 10 years of child maintenance have not been beyond reproach. It is therefore essential to the well-being of Britain’s less advantaged young that CMEC does not fail. That starts with the Bill’s proposals being watertight in theory so that they may be watertight in practice.
Amendments Nos. 6 and 7 seek to discover the size of the commission. Although we are wary of there being too large a number of directors on the board of any commission, we chose as a maximum three executive directors and four non-executive directors to ensure that the Bill was consistent. Paragraph 20(2) of Schedule 1 dictates that the non-executive functions committee cannot be made up of fewer than three members of the commission. It must therefore be set out that there are three members of the commission.
Amendments Nos. 15 and 16 would ensure that any committee or sub-committee bred by the commission would not be entirely unrelated to it. While we do not
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Lord McKenzie of Luton: I thank the noble Baroness for the spirit in which she moved the amendment. I agree that we must do everything that we can to ensure that CMEC succeeds. The amendments seek to examine and ratify particular aspects of the governance structure that we have proposed for the commission.
As has been explained, Amendments Nos. 6 and 7 would limit the number of executive directors appointed to the board of the commission to a maximum of three, and the number of non-executive directors appointed to a maximum of four. That would limit board membership to nine, including the chair and commissioner.
We have deliberately chosen not to specify the size of the board absolutely, which is consistent with the constitution of other NDPBs such as the Pensions Regulator and the Pension Protection Fund, which do not have a board maximum set in statute. Given the level of change expected in the commission as the reforms are introduced and take effect, the commission itself will be best placed to determine the most effective board size—in other words, the members of the board—to meet the statutory responsibilities for which it is accountable to Parliament. Similarly, the decision whether to have committees and sub-committees, and what the membership of such committees should be, should be a decision for the board alone.
The commission remains responsible for ensuring that its statutory functions are exercised in the manner prescribed in legislation. To support the commission in its ability to delegate functions as it sees best, we have provided that the board may form a committee for any purpose and that, if it chooses, it may delegate any of its functions to it in addition to any member of the board or member of staff. In giving the board the ability to create committees for any purpose, we also believe that it is important that it is given the ability to determine the membership of such committees. We have therefore provided that committees can include individuals who are not members of staff, which enables the commission to draw on as wide a body of expertise as possible. For example, it is possible to envisage a committee with responsibility for policy development that might include stakeholders such as one-parent families, or that the audit committee might include an employee of the NAO.
Amendments Nos. 15 and 16 would require that a member of the commission—in other words, a member of the board—must serve on every committee. While
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Baroness Verma: I thank the Minister for his considerations. It would be useful to probe a little further into the size the Minister envisages for the committee. There must be a limit to how big or small it will be.
Turning to Amendments Nos. 15 and 16, if we are going to encourage the continuity of a programme, we shall need some sort of continuity in the membership of the board. The amendments are probing in nature to ask about the size of the committee.
Lord McKenzie of Luton: On the latter point, one could envisage that it would normally be the case that at least one member of the board would serve on a committee or sub-committee, but if we were to preclude the alternative we might rule out situations where perhaps a minor technical issue needed to be addressed or outside expertise needed to be available to take forward a particular policy development. All that is entirely appropriate. The noble Baroness is absolutely right to say that if that happens, there should be processes for reporting back and thus ensuring continuity of information about the deliberations about a particular sub-committee. However, if we were to say that there could never be a situation where a member of the board did not serve on a committee or sub-committee, that would be unduly restrictive.
On the first point, I do not have a fixed view about the number envisaged by the commission because I have not checked the numbers sitting on the boards of other NDPBs. I imagine that it varies. As I have said, it is for the commission to determine that. Obviously it will have clear reporting lines about its immediate objectives back to the Secretary of State and it will want to make sure that it has the mix of skills that it needs. Similarly, I imagine that it would have to have due regard to the fact that it does not want to overload the board with people who are not making a contribution. However, I think that we need to leave it to the commission.
Baroness Verma: Again, I thank the Minister for his considerations. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Lord McKenzie of Luton moved Amendments Nos. 8 to 13:
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Schedule 1, page 47, line 26, after “may” insert “, with the approval of the Minister for the Civil Service,”
Schedule 1, page 47, line 36, after “may” insert “, with the approval of the Minister for the Civil Service,”
On Question, amendments agreed to.
[Amendments Nos. 14 to 16 not moved.]
Lord McKenzie of Luton moved Amendments Nos. 17 to 22:
“22 (1) The functions of the Commission, and of its members, are to be exercised on behalf of the Crown.
Schedule 1, page 52, line 1, leave out from “increase” to end of line 2 and insert “in the sums payable out of money provided by Parliament that is attributable to the provision of relevant pensions”
“( ) In sub-paragraph (2), “relevant pensions” means pensions, allowances or gratuities under section 1 of the Superannuation Act 1972 (c. 11) payable to or in respect of persons who are or have been in the service of the Commission.”
Schedule 1, page 52, line 24, leave out “employees of the Commission” and insert “staff appointed under paragraph 10”
On Question, amendments agreed to.
Schedule 1, as amended, agreed to.
Clause 2 [Objectives of the Commission]:
Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope moved Amendment No. 23:
(a) to maximise the number of those children who live apart from one or both of those parents for whom effective maintenance arrangements are in place;(b) to secure the payment of any arrears of child support maintenance including sums owed pursuant to the Child Support Act 1991 (c. 48) prior to the establishment of the Commission.”The noble Lord said: I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 27 and 36. We can dispatch this small group of amendments with some speed, but we need to spend a little time on debt. Amendment No. 23 seeks to insert into the objectives set out in Clause 2 the recovery of debt as a specific aim, while Amendments Nos. 27 and 36 are less significant but have the same purpose, which is to try to tighten up
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6 pm
I shall detain the Committee briefly on the question of the importance of adding debt to its core objectives as we set up the new commission. I refer directly to the evidence given by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, to the Public Bill Committee in the House of Commons on 17 July at Question 83. He was asked about write-off of historic debt. I shall quote three sentences of his reply, which really stimulates the amendment. The Minister said:
“We would like as many of those old debts to be cleared as possible. Obviously, that is quite resource-intensive, and Stephen”—
“One of things that it is proposed we do is, rather than write off debt, create a provision for reflecting the effect of inflated or uncollectable debt in the account. However, those debts would remain in being and would not be written off until there is consent from the parent with care”.
I would like better to understand what that relates to. It was reinforced later by Mr Geraghty at Question 84, when he said:
“There comes a point in any debt collection exercise where it is a question of how much we can get. I think that we are a long way from that, but presumably the commission and Parliament will, at some point, want to consider whether they want to keep the debts going”.—[Official Report, Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill Committee, 17/7/07; cols. 34-5.]
That is the background to the amendment, and it raises some rather obvious questions. They are not easy questions because, for reasons to which we alluded earlier, there is a lot of uncollected debt, some of it allegedly recoverable and some not. In tabling the amendment, I noticed—this made me even more concerned—that the Child Support Agency annual report already has a footnote, which I confess that I do not fully understand, that suggests that some of that debt is already parked. That is not to say that it is not on the books; it remains on the books, but it is in a different part, in a footnote, and it is harder for people who are not accountants to find.
Net debt balance is obviously a bookkeeping exercise; I understand that. What I want the new commission to take to its heart as a core objective is to comb through individual cases. That is what parents with care who are owed substantial sums of money are expecting. It is only because of the lack of computer facility and compliance that we are unable to do that with the expedition that people would like.
In other clauses, the Bill certainly gives new, useful powers to the agency. That will give the commission, by the end of 2009, at the end of the operational improvement programme, a much more realistic handle on what is the debt book and what is collectable. However, the proposals are very cautious,
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Arguably, at some stage, the commission will have to come clean and write to the parents with care involved to say that it does not intend to take any more steps to try to effect recovery of some of those debts. I do not know how that can be done in bulk, but I know that the parents with care I talk to expect nothing less than that their cases will be addressed individually, that some day they will have a day of reckoning and that they will be told what is realistic to be recovered and what is not.
If we do not have a clear set of guidelines in Clause 2 that are core principles, the suspicion will be that the commission will quietly turn its back and tiptoe away from those parents. That would be unconscionable, because some of that debt has been accrued because of the incompetence of the agency, which failed to take, or delayed, appropriate action by not using the powers it had had since 1991. As a result, people have lost money—some of them substantial sums. They ask me, why should the Government simply gallop away to a shiny new future and leave all those people behind? That is a perfectly valid question. Amendment No. 23 is the only way that I can think of trying to give them some comfort that in the future this new commission will be held to account in terms of collecting arrears.
Finally—we will come on to these matters in later clauses—if it turns out that large proportions of these historic legacy debts are to be written off, we need a compensation scheme to deal with it. Where it can be demonstrated that the fault lies in the past incompetence of the agency, expecting people to ask the independent case assessor to take action and go through the formal compensation process would be completely inadequate for the task. A special new compensation package would be needed that could deal sensibly with the numbers we would be talking about. Where the debt was uncollectable on cause shown because the agency did not do its job, there would be some accounting and some money would flow. But none of that can happen until we see what kind of effort the commission makes with these huge residual legacy debts. I could weary the Committee with the statistics; I will not, but I strongly recommend that if we do not put something in the core objectives of this commission on collection of debt, it will be part-forgotten and people will suffer as a result. I beg to move.
Lord Skelmersdale: I and my noble friend Lady Verma have added our names to the last two amendments in the group, Amendments Nos. 27 and 36, but I shall first speak to Amendment No. 23. For the first time this afternoon, I have some sympathy with the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, who will be surprised to hear that.
[The Sitting was suspended for a Division in the House from 6.07 to 6.19 pm.]
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The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Brougham and Vaux): I think we should continue.
Lord Skelmersdale: I am very happy to continue but I am sorry that I shall have to do so in the absence of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. Presumably the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is going to take over.
I was saying, to the appreciation of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, that I have some sympathy with Amendment No. 23 which stands in his name. I believe that the collection of child maintenance should be continued even though a child has passed into the age of adulthood. I am somewhat confused because the Government seem keen to reduce this. I do not know whether there is a statutory age for the end of childhood because it appears to differ depending on the circumstances. At certain moments, it appears to be 18. If you are adopted, you need the court’s approval to marry at 16 but this requirement ceases at 18. Proposals are afoot to reduce the voting age but I do not know whether that has any bearing on the age of majority. The Government are being somewhat schizophrenic. They propose that the legal age for youngsters to leave education shall be raised to 18; until just the other day you could buy cigarettes—of which I was guilty—at 16 but alcohol at 18; you can join the Army at 16 but not be sent to a theatre of operations until you are 18. So I am not to blame for being confused about the legal age for the end of childhood. I hope the Minister can clear that up for me.
Whether or not he does so, and whether childhood ends at 16 or 18, or even in between, I must return specifically to the amendment. The fact that the qualifying child is now grown up and may well not be living with his or her former parent with care makes no difference to the outstanding debt which may have arisen when he or she was younger. The question that does not seem to be answered by the legislation is: who does the money belong to? To my mind, it should be clear that the money is for the good of the child. So whilst he—this is not sexist, the Interpretation Act applies—is living with the parent with care the money is to be in the control of that parent, as it would be for any minor. When he becomes an adult or moves out or both, the money should go directly to him. Not only that, but the backlog that was not paid by the absent parent when he was a child should still be paid and, again, to him. There should be no age cut off point for this.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the Minister agrees with me—in principle anyway. However, the question that he must answer is whether he agrees that this issue is important enough to be included as a main objective in the Bill, which is what the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, seeks. Perhaps I may gently suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, that it should be a secondary consideration and therefore would be more appropriate in subsection (2).
Amendment No. 27 is a probing amendment to explore why there seems to be a get-out clause in the stated objectives of CMEC. Clause 2 sets out the commission’s objectives, one of which is to support
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I feel that that proviso lacks precision. Although that might not be intended in the drafting, it could be interpreted as a loophole. Does the Minister agree that it is unacceptable for the commission to decide for itself when it is appropriate to require a non-resident parent to meet his obligation and when this can be simply ignored? What standards of appropriateness does the Minister have in mind? Surely the priority should be the potential benefit of the maintenance arrangements, and that is what should determine whether the commission seeks to ensure compliance. However, with the commission as the final arbiter of what is appropriate, there is no guarantee that any other potentially unrelated reason is used to shirk the responsibility of ensuring compliance. Can the noble Lord explain the need for the commission to decide for itself when it does its job and when it does not have to?
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