Child Maintenance

Friday 13th July 2012 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Maria Miller)]

I will shortly lay the 2012 Child Maintenance Command Paper (Cm 8399) entitled “Supporting separated families; securing children’s fixtures”. This paper will set out the details of the Government’s approach to the child maintenance landscape so that it is centred on supporting families.

For too long we have had a child maintenance system in this country that fails children, fails parents and fails the taxpayer. Half (over 1.5 million) of children living in separated families have no effective child maintenance arrangement in place despite a statutory system of maintenance that costs the taxpayer almost £500 million each and every year. There is little support for parents to work collaboratively and the present system provides little incentive for recalcitrant parents to take their financial responsibilities seriously, without the state incurring hefty enforcement costs. This has to change.

In January 2011, we published the Green Paper “Strengthening families; promoting parental responsibility; the future of child maintenance” Cm 7990 (available on the Department’s website at: http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/strengthening-families.pdf. The Green Paper laid out our ideas about how the new child maintenance system might look; placing a greater emphasis on supporting parents to make their own arrangements; continuing to provide a heavily subsidised statutory scheme for those unable to do so; and introducing service charges for the use of the statutory scheme to provide a financial incentive to collaborate.

The Command Paper sets out further details on the ideas put forward in the Green Paper and provides more on: services for separated and separating families and how we will support parents to work together including maintenance direct; the new statutory scheme and its revised methods for calculating maintenance; and the programme for closing existing cases and moving them into one of the options in the new approach. Evidence shows that children benefit when parents work together after separation and the Government’s aim, through all of the proposed measures, is to encourage collaboration between parents.

Working with the voluntary and community sector, I am committed to helping ensure better co-ordinated services for separated and separating families so that, where parents decide to separate, they receive the right information and support to help them maintain a collaborative relationship with each other, including agreeing maintenance arrangements, in the best interests of their children. I announced our intention to invest £20 million in this programme in January and today I am setting out details—plans developed with the support of voluntary organisations—of how this money will be used to support families including online, on the telephone and face-to-face.

The new statutory scheme, which will be branded the “Child Maintenance Service”, will be faster and more efficient, using annual gross income reported by HMRC. I am setting out today further details of the new scheme including maintenance direct and collection charges, to encourage parents to pay each other directly within the statutory scheme. I am also setting out the proposed levels of charges where people fail to keep up to date with their maintenance and require expensive enforcement action to secure payments for their children.

All existing Child Support Agency cases will be closed to offer clients the opportunity to think again, with proper support, about whether a family-based arrangement may be best for their children. I am setting out today further details on the proposed way in which this process of case closure will work.

Draft regulations governing charging and case closure will also be published. A 14-week consultation on these will begin next week.

I will place the impact assessments and draft regulations for consultation in the House Library. These documents and the Command Paper will be published on the Department for Work and Pensions’ website shortly.