Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Bishop of Manchester and Baroness Sherlock

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock]

I came across a quotation from the Committee stage:

“For even though marriages may break down, parenthood is for life. Legislation can't make irresponsible parents responsible. But it can and must ensure that absent parents pay maintenance for their children”.

That was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, in 1990. She went on to talk about setting up the CSA. We have heard a lot about the failings of the CSA, but more than £1 billion changed hands last year through it. Before it was set up, lone parents had only the option of going to the courts to try to enforce maintenance, and in the vast majority of cases, they could not afford to go and could not afford to enforce it if it happened.

There are two very simple reasons for backing this amendment, which is why my name is on it. The first is simple compassion. There is no good reason why a single parent should have to hand over to the state not only £100 up front but up to 12 per cent of the money that is currently going to her children simply to have what is owed to her in law paid.

The second is a question of justice. If the Government’s intention is to change behaviour and to make sure that the absent parent pays up, they should charge him. What can the lone parent possibly do, other than ask, to make him pay up? Yet she will be penalised for his failure to pay. There is no behaviour change that she could possibly undertake, other than to ask nicely. She cannot do anything. That is why she has gone to the state in the first place. She has come to the state to ask for the help that the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, recognised all those years ago and set up an agency to give. We must not fail her today.

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, many of my parish priests would endorse the kind of things that we have heard of this afternoon, the many cases where single parents—97 per cent of them mothers—are placed in a most cruel and unfair position. It is only recently, I think, that the Prime Minister said that our society must do more to make fathers understand and take responsibility for their paternal aspects which they have taken on by becoming fathers. What I do not think he said but, unfortunately, what this Bill does is that the mother who is left on her own without any financial backing from that father should therefore pay this huge penalty. That is what this Bill is requiring at the moment. It seems to me that what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, is putting before this House is a very sensible and compassionate way of undoing an injustice which I do not believe the Government really intended in the beginning. I hope that the Minister will see his way forward to recognising the great power of opinion that he must surely have heard this afternoon in this House.