Child Maintenance Service

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Baroness Stedman-Scott

Thursday 24th June 2021 Grand Committee

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Stedman-Scott) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for his question, which has led to this important, albeit short, debate. I also thank all noble Lords who have participated and made many excellent points. I completely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock—indeed, we all agree—that this is an important subject and area of work. In summing up, I will try to address as many of the points made as I can. If I cannot address all of them, I will write to colleagues in detail.

I hold surgeries every quarter with MPs from the Commons, and for all MPs who have written to me personally about cases, I have dealt with each and every one. So I commit to organising an all-Peers child maintenance session so that we have the time after this debate to get into the detail, as I know all noble Lords want to do.

My noble friends Lord McColl and Lady Eaton wanted to know that the child maintenance system is working. We continue to keep the child maintenance policy and our operational delivery under constant review. I was pleased that my noble friend Lady Eaton referred to the new digital services, such as the apply online service that has been introduced; it has reduced average application times, is available 24/7 and allows greater flexibility for separated parents to contact the Child Maintenance Service. Operational reforms such as these help to improve outcomes for children by enabling parents to set up and manage child maintenance arrangements in ways that suit their own circumstances.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Massey and Lady Sherlock, raised the National Audit Office report. I am pleased to confirm that our officials are working well with the National Audit Office—it is work in progress. It is a value-for-money study and will be completed during October and November.

On child maintenance performance and track record, I know that many noble Lords will have experience of the various child maintenance schemes—already referred to by my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay—that there have been over the years. This is an area where the Government have learned a lot. They are completely committed to ensuring that parents play their part and take responsibility for supporting their children. The child maintenance system has had a difficult history in our country, but I am sure most colleagues would agree that the Child Maintenance Service is a significant improvement. As has already been referenced, more than 750,000 children are now covered by child maintenance arrangements. In the past year—2019-20—more than £1 billion was due to be paid through direct pay and the collect and pay service. The compliance rate for parents on the collect and pay service has increased significantly, rising by six percentage points between the quarter ending December 2018 and the quarter ending December 2020.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, said, during the Covid public health emergency, a number of temporary changes were made to the Child Maintenance Service. On the question that the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, asked me, 1,507 FTEs were redeployed in the Covid emergency to make sure that we could get money to people. I can give noble Lords a categoric assurance that they are all back and we are back in full service mode.

In December 2020, more than 40,000 paying parents on the collect and pay service had a deduction from earnings order in place, collecting more than £25 million. More than 60,000 deductions from benefits were in force and more than 3,500 deduction orders were in place, collecting a record £3.3 million from bank accounts. I am confident that we will maintain these improvements as we move forward.

My noble friend Lord Farmer and the noble Baronesses, Lady Massey and Lady Sherlock, raised the issue of enforcement powers. The Child Maintenance Service’s enforcement powers are strong and are used widely against those who consistently refuse to meet their obligations to support their children. I have been absolutely staggered at the lengths that people will go to in order to avoid paying their child maintenance. There was an absent dad who owed £80,000 in child maintenance and thought that he could avoid paying it, despite having a great lifestyle. The financial investigation and enforcement teams were right behind him and managed to get that £80,000, which was a life-changing amount of money for the receiving parent. He had £175,000 in the bank. So we are not having any of it—I can tell you that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, raised the issue of child maintenance and child poverty. We know that child maintenance can play an effective role in reducing child poverty and enhancing the life outcomes of children in separated families. Child maintenance helps to reduce the chances of children being raised in the lowest 20% of the income distribution, and we know that approximately 120,000 fewer children are growing up in poverty as a result of child maintenance payments.

The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, raised the issue of lone parents, who are much more likely to live in low-income households. Extra money coming in through child maintenance can make a real difference to these families, as it is disregarded in full in universal credit. Lone parents get to keep every pound of maintenance paid, and we encourage lone parents on benefits to make a claim for child maintenance. I am pleased to say that my very first visit as a Minister was to Gingerbread and that my colleagues and officials have a very good ongoing relationship with both Gingerbread and Families Need Fathers, and we consistently listen to the issues that they raise with us.

I come now to parental conflict, which the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, my noble friend Lord Farmer and my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay all raised. When two people fall out, the repercussions are felt far and wide by children, and we are only too aware that we have to try to intervene at the right time to reduce this conflict. That is why we have our Reducing Parental Conflict programme, and we are very pleased with the impact that it has had to date. In government, we have a cross-departmental working group on it, involving the Department for Health and Social Care, the Home Office and MHCLG.

Of course, at this point, I want to raise family hubs. We have five government departments working together on family hubs, and we hope that the Reducing Parental Conflict programme can be one of the tools in their armoury. We know that the sooner we intervene in the breakdown of a relationship, the better the outcome can be—and I would be very happy to give more information to noble Lords about that when we meet again.

Before I close my remarks today and deal with some of the other issues that were raised, I will touch on domestic abuse, which I know is a matter of deep concern to all noble Lords. It is vital that the Child Maintenance Service plays its part in supporting victims of domestic abuse. We will continue to waive the application fee for domestic abuse victims and to provide support to allow victims to set up maintenance arrangements safely. The Child Maintenance Service has ramped up domestic abuse training for front-line staff and will continue to review its ways of working to further address a culture where victims of domestic abuse are in absolute poverty—they are a priority. In that vein, I am in the process of commissioning an independent review of ways in which the Child Maintenance Service supports victims of domestic abuse.

Noble Lords raised the issue of the consultation, which we have issued and are embarking on. I give an invitation to all noble Lords: if they have other things they want us to consider, the door is open and they should let us know what those things are. I would now like to cover other important issues that have been raised.

We are grateful to SSAC for raising issues and we have had the opportunity to discuss them with concerned stakeholders. The views expressed will be used to inform future policy development. In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, I think I have already said that the system is now fully operational, and the number of staff on child maintenance has gone from 5,500 to 4,700 due to the last CSA cases being closed. Capacity of the system is broadly at pre-Covid levels.

Noble Lords raised the issue of aligning Great Britain with other jurisdictions. We are in close contact with officials in other jurisdictions. As my noble friend Lord Farmer observed, it is hard to transplant measures from one jurisdiction to another, but we continue to monitor international developments in this field. I believe that covers the issue of the situation in Australia. Dual income adds significant complexity to a child maintenance calculation and measures that work in one place do not necessarily work in another. I am happy to continue to discuss that and keep the issue under the review.

On family-based arrangements, we recognise that conflict is harmful to children and the intent of the 2012 maintenance reforms was to try to promote collaboration between separated parents. We know that a family-based arrangement is not for everybody, so we offer people other ways of paying. I think my noble friends Lord McColl and Lord Farmer raised the issue of the appeals process and whether it works. We have made changes to the appeals process and, if a complainant is still unsatisfied with the response they have, they can escalate it to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. Noble Lords asked me to tell them about the progress of the Government’s commitment to supporting parents to make family-based arrangements. The survey we did will be published in due course.

I am sorry to have run out of time, because this is a subject dear to my heart; I could spend all day talking to noble Lords about it and answering your questions, believe me. Please go away from here understanding that we know child maintenance is important, we are on it and we are going to make the changes we need to make to take children out of poverty so they can get the best chances in life.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

Thank you, Minister. That completes the business before the Grand Committee this afternoon. I remind Members to sanitise their desks and chairs before leaving the Room.

Pension Schemes Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Baroness Stedman-Scott

Consideration of Commons amendments & Ping Pong (Hansard) & Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 19th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords, I will first respond to the question of my noble friend Lady Altmann on long-term horizons. The scheme funding measures in the Bill, together with secondary legislation and a revised scheme funding code of practice, seek to support trustees and employers to manage this scheme funding with a focus on longer term planning. As now, the scheme’s liquidity requirements, investment timelines and the amount of risk each scheme can support will depend on factors including its maturity and the strength of its employer covenant. Trustees can and do invest in illiquid assets such as infrastructure, and our measures do not seek to discourage such investments where they are appropriate.

I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Davies, for his contribution. The thought of being locked out of a sweet shop gives me more heartache than your Lordships will know. We will do our very best to make sure that it does not happen again. We welcome the noble Lord to the House and have no doubt that he will add a lot of expertise. He has joined the formidable band of brothers on pensions and we are very glad he is with us.

I am very grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Bowles and Lady Sherlock, for their amendments. I am also grateful to all those who have contributed to the debates we had relating to schemes that are open to new members. They have been highly influential and have helped us refine our thinking on how schemes in these circumstances should be treated. The Government are very sympathetic to the thinking behind these amendments, but there are good reasons why we do not want to deal with these matters on the face of the Bill.

One of the main drivers behind our reforms to the scheme funding arrangement is the desire to be able to more effectively tackle the small minority of schemes and employers who push the flexibilities of our scheme-specific arrangements further than is appropriate, to the detriment of their members. As the detail of the arrangements is necessarily complex, there is a real risk that attempting to deal with it in primary legislation will inadvertently weaken the funding regime as a whole and undermine the ability of the Pensions Regulator to tackle the very issues that these reforms were designed to address. Rather, we think that the best place to deal with these matters is in regulations—following a full consultation. That way, we can work closely with the full range of interested parties, effectively calibrate the system and get the right balance between member security and employer affordability. By placing such matters in regulations, we will retain the flexibility in the future to adjust the relevant parameters should the evolving economic situation demand it.

What I can do now is set out some key principles of how we will proceed with framing the secondary legislation, which I am happy to put on the record and am confident will provide noble Lords with the reassurance they are looking for. Much of our original thinking was driven by the fact that most schemes are closed and maturing, but we completely accept that we need to be clearer about our thinking on other important groups of schemes. These are the schemes that continue to admit new members. Many of these schemes will not be maturing in the same way as closed schemes and some of them will be admitting sufficient new members to avoid maturing at all. A genuinely scheme-specific approach has to recognise the characteristics of such schemes and treat them appropriately. I am therefore grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, and others for helping us to focus our thinking on these schemes. Let me make it clear now that the Government, having further considered the debate on the Bill and feedback from the pensions industry, fully intend that the defined benefit funding regime will remain scheme specific, and any bespoke approach should build on this foundation. This regime will continue to apply flexibility to take account of individual scheme circumstances.

The department confirms that detailed provisions for ongoing defined benefit funding, including any necessary assessment criteria and metrics, will be set out in regulations and in the Pension Regulator’s defined benefit funding code of practice, which will acknowledge the position of open and less mature schemes. As noble Lords have said, Ministers at the DWP have gone to great lengths to make themselves available to those who have pressed them on the position of schemes that remain open to new members. Both Ministers and officials have had extensive discussions with interested Peers, and others, including on schemes that remain open to new members. I also understand that interested Peers have been able to discuss these matters in detail with senior officials at the Pensions Regulator. This has been a highly productive engagement and, as I have said, it has been instrumental in guiding us to a better and more refined policy position. That is something I expect to continue.

Prior to the publication of the draft regulations, the Government can commit to an engagement programme with interested parties, including a range of schemes. These will include those remaining open and immature. They will launch a consultation document informed by this engagement. The Government will also publish a regulatory impact assessment of the draft regulations and the Pensions Regulator will publish an impact assessment alongside its revised funding code. These will include analyses of different de-risking approaches on members and sponsors of all schemes, including those that are open or immature, and those that are not targeting buyout.

We absolutely do not want to see good and viable defined benefit schemes close unnecessarily. We want them to be treated on their merits in a truly scheme-specific regime. We have said that open schemes should be able to provide the same level of security for members as closed schemes. I want to make it absolutely clear that this does not mean that they necessarily need to invest in the same way. We simply mean that members in an open scheme should be able to enjoy the same level of confidence that the benefits they have worked hard to build up will be paid in full, as for members in a closed scheme. We completely agree that open schemes that are not maturing and have a strong employer covenant should not be forced into an inappropriate de-risking journey. We will ensure that such schemes and employers which can support a higher risk and higher expected reward investment strategy can continue to invest in this way. If they are already doing the right thing, they should not need to significantly increase contributions as a result of these new measures.

The Government accept that for some schemes, depending on the circumstances, de-risking is not the best way to safeguard members’ benefits. Member benefits can be best safeguarded by an appropriate integrated risk management strategy determined after careful analysis by the trustees, which takes account of time horizon, liquidity, employer covenant and appropriate diversification.

This is the way that we intend to proceed as, with the help of close engagement with interested parties, we work on the regulations that will set out the detail of how the funding regime will operate. I hope that what I have said reassures noble Lords of our intentions and that the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw her amendment.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

My Lords, I have not received any requests to speak after the Minister, so I now call the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles of Berkhamsted, to reply.

Covid-19: Low-income Families

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Baroness Stedman-Scott

Thursday 8th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, also raised with me, outside the Chamber, the issue of food, children and holiday cover. I pledged to talk to my noble friend Lady Berridge. I have been so busy that I have not been able to do that, but I give an undertaking to do so and to write to the noble Baroness.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

My Lords, the time allowed for this Question has elapsed. I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, that there was no time for her question. We now come to the second Oral Question, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Polak.