Child Support: Unpaid Maintenance

Debate between Baroness Royall of Blaisdon and Lord Henley

Thursday 30th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they are taking to expedite the collection of over £3 billion in unpaid child maintenance which was ordered by the former Child Support Agency.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Henley) (Con)]

My Lords, the main focus of the Department for Work and Pensions is to collect money owed that will benefit children today. It is well established that much of this old debt is uncollectable due to its age and the circumstances of these cases. The department is currently developing a new strategy for handling historic arrears accrued on Child Support Agency schemes. We will consult on the proposed approach before publishing the new strategy.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, I simply do not think that is acceptable because, according to a withering NAO report, around £3 billion in child maintenance is likely to be uncollectable. The Government say that they are offering parents a fresh start by suggesting that they write off debts to which their children are legally entitled. These are some of the poorest children in society, suffering as a result of incompetence and cuts in enforcement work, so why do not the Government restore staffing levels, step up enforcement and ensure that the new Child Maintenance Service is obliged to collect outstanding debts?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I would be more than happy to accept the noble Baroness’s assessment that this is withering and the figures are astronomical if we were talking about figures that related to the children who are likely to benefit today. A lot of this £3.9 billion—sorry, £3.8 billion; there are different figures according to different things—goes back a very long way to the 1993 scheme. Some of it goes back before the reforms introduced in 2003 by the Government of whom the noble Baroness was a member, and some of it goes back before 2008. If the noble Baroness thinks about the number of years that have passed, she will realise that those children are now grown up and will not benefit from recovering that money. It is very sad that absent parents have behaved badly. The only people who have lost out—as the noble Baroness put it—are those children. However, we are concerned about the children of today and to make sure that matters operate properly now, and that the money owed by absent parents, where the department has a role in trying to enforce that, gets paid to the caring parent so that the appropriate children benefit. I am terribly sorry but a lot of that £3.9 billion is in effect lost, as the noble Baroness said, to those children who are no longer children now.